16 hotel employees share the strangest request they ever received from a guest.

Working in customer service can turn any calm, rational, and emotionally intelligent person into a cave-dwelling hermit who happily lives off the grid...

Fake-smiling, trying to choke down laughter while a complete stranger threatens both your life and livelihood over a missing side of fries, or performing extreme mental gymnastics to accodomate completely bizarre requests--working with the general public is not for the weak. So, when a Reddit user asked people who work in hotels, 'What's the strangest request you've had from a guest?' concierges and housekeepers everywhere were ready to gossip.

1.

I was once called up to someone's room to staple/superglue his black bowtie back together again; He'd managed to tear it straight in half. I brought a spare up instead. - kunstlich

2.

Strange as in 'I get this way too often...': 'Hi there, strange desk agent. In the 15 seconds I've known you, I've decided you seem trustworthy enough that I can request you to be responsible for something precious and irreplaceable. Watch my kid.' - sig863

3.

The worst of them has become infamous at my hotel. She was known as the 'Scent Lady' I was working as a front desk agent when an extremely neurotic mother with 6-year-old identical twins (we called them Mullet and Bowlcut) and an apathetic husband called six times to make sure that our hotel was 'environmently-friendly' since her children were 'sensitive'.

After assuring her our cleaning products were 'Green', we recycle and use soy-based inks, she freaked out when she arrived and realized that 'Green' did not mean fragrance-free.

She threw a hissyfit in the lobby and demaded that the hypoallergenic room she booked was 'triple-checked' (once by the housekeeper, then by the head of housekeeping, then by the manager-on-duty) to make sure there were no fragrances (and that we removed the complementary soaps/lotions) because they caused permanent neurological dammage.

After finally approving the room (two hours later). She screamed at the bellman, who was trying to be helpful by assisting them with the fourteen market-style shopping bags of their belongings (something about the chemicals in plastic suitcases seeping into clothes) because she thought she smelled his deoderant and it would 'contaminate' their belongings.

Unable to handle all the bags and both children at once, she demanded that I watch Mullet, who had fallen asleep on a lobby chair, while she made sure all of their things made it up to the room uncontaminated. The only parting instructions I was given were: 'If he wakes up and gets scared, his name is Mullet.' The instructions came from his twin brother, Bowlcut.

An hour and a half later, my manager gets fed up that one of his desk agents is playing babysitter to a passed-out child in his lobby and the strange looks being given by other guests as they pass by. He calls up to the room and asks them to please get their son. Twenty minutes later, Dad finally comes downstairs, hefts Mullet over his shoulder and hauls him away. - sig863

4.

I got issues with sleepwalkers who hadn't brought pajamas. They'd get up and lock themselves out and then wake up and realize they had to get back into their rooms without a key. Or ID. Or clothing of any sort. Usually they would shuffle up to the desk with a welcome mat covering their junk and a story that I didn't need to hear. - IAMATruckerAMA

5.

Eons ago, before the prevalence of on-screen-selection in-room movies, I worked Front Desk at a hotel that rented VCRs and videos to guests. This included a small selection of porn. One night at about 2am, a guest called down to inquire about VCR/video rental.

He asked me to read him the titles of the adult movies. Repeatedly. 'I didn't hear that, could you tell me that one slower? Oh yes, like that.' He then requested that I bring a VCR and 2 of the videos to his room. Rrrright. - dospinacoladas

6.

I worked for six years at a luxury hotel. It's a bit of a challenge to think of which stories that I can relate that won't somehow violate the non-disclosure agreement that I signed while I was there...

I think the winner would likely be from the televangelist that was staying in our highest end suite (i.e. $15,000 rack rate). He and his entourage, mere minutes after checking in, called down to complain about the strange banging noises that they could hear coming from the roof. The MOD, engineering, and myself [security] headed up there, expecting some sort of issue with the HVAC or the like. We couldn't hear jack.

The guest was convinced that the suite was haunted (frankly, a lot of the staff would agree with him on that point), and that the source of the haunting was the Arabic script inlaid in the tilework in the billiard room attached to the suite. It was, of course, 'of the Devil'. 11:30 at night, I'm stressing about catching the last train out of town, while coordinating with engineering to have the offending Satanic verses covered up with black construction paper so that he could sleep in peace that night. - leicanthrope

7.

When I worked in reservations a guest told me he needed two connecting rooms, one for him and one for his pet monkey because the monkey couldn't sleep in the same room as him, that would be weird. - killerbees19

8.

Lord of the Rings convention - attendees dressed like Hobbits, would call room service and try to order in Elvish, called housekeeping to get their cloaks dry-cleaned, would tape hair to their feet and walk around the hotel barefoot - killerbees19

9.

Strangest request by far. Started off 'Could you come up to my room and say these are yours'...ended with me telling some 15 year old's Mom that I had somehow left/failed to remove porn magazines in their room while cleaning. I worked the front desk not housekeeping, I ended up having to comp the room and tell my manager they claimed to have found bugs, and the kid never even tipped me. - spiderblood

10.

I take hotel reservations. I had a guy ask me if he could bring in a bunch of women, a tarp, and have a 'water fight' with squirt guns and a fountain... - froggy311

11.

Oh no, no, no, no.... I totally win this. I worked as the front desk of a hotel for 2 years, graveyard shift. I am a woman. One night I get a call from a man staying in the hotel. He proceeds to ask my how to get the bulb end of a turkey baster out of his wife's vagina.

I told him he should probably call a hospital, and the man being very distressed told me the ER wouldn't give advice over the phone, his wife was too embarrassed to go to the hospital, and the old folks home that he called to ask to speak to a nurse on duty was just a dirty old man trying to tell him to turn his wife on enough so it would pop out. The dirty old man even offered to help 'dirty talk' to the wife to get her hot and bothered. I was 18 and like... what the fu*ck is happening?

So I tell the guy to have his wife squat on the ground and to bear down like she's trying to poo and after like an hour of her trying it finally worked. Forward 3 months later, when I get a phone call from the man on the phone, while I was at a different hotel that the managers owned.

He called to tell me thank you so much for not hanging up on him, and for being the only one to help them out. That is the craziest thing someone ever asked me. - Dat_What_She_Said

12.

a ROOM FULL OF BANANAS - hottubfriday

13.

As a hotel concierge, strange has become the norm for me. I've done things from hopping on a flight to New York to pick up a incoming guest's shoes from a particular store for a event she was attending later that evening to trimming a patch of grass by hand in a hotel room because the dog was quite picky about the length on its grass bed.

Oh and wedding proposals, every single one I have had to help arrange was always stressful with so many last minute changes! But having a perfect 'she or he said yes' record at the moment makes it worth while. - Siadena

14.

I've worked in hotels for 2 years now. The most memorable one was the time a guy came running into the lobby screaming 'The toilets on fire! I need someone who can put out a fire.' he was loosing his shit. the desk clerk called 911 and me and a security guard went to check on the toilet.

The guy was either very drunk or very high, because he had taken a huge sh*t and wanted the smell to go away. So instead of flushing, he put a candle on the pile of sh*t in the toilet. Then forgot about it. So when he came back into the bathroom he just seen a flame and flipped out. - cjkawng

15.

I was once paid my regular pay as well as $300 cash by a meeting planner to teach a corporate retreat how to play Rock Band. - minnick85

16.

I had an elderly man ask for a raised toilet seat, I was assuming that he or his wife had problems getting up from the low seat and didn't think anything of it. However, he decided to inform me it was because with our low toilet seats his balls hung down into the water. Tmi? Yes. Best laugh ever? Indeed. - autumnklnss