Not an appliance, but an interesting mechanical system

[dalangdon]

When I was in college I worked at a small hotel that was run by the university. They had a 60's era mechanical system of keeping track of rooms for front desk and housekeeping that involved magnets.

When a maid went into a room to clean it, she would place a little magnet thingy on a panel in the room. That would make a light flash next to the respective room number on a status panel in the housekeeping office, and at the front desk. When she was done, she would put it on another part of the panel, which would switch the status of the room in the office and desk to something else (another color?) to tell you that the room was clean. The end result was that housekeeping could always tell where a maid was at, and the desk could tell what rooms were available for rental.

The desk could also use the system to let a guest know if they had a message by pressing a button next to the room, which would light up a button on the houskeeping panel in the guest's room. To ackowledge the message, they would push a button and
(hopefully) call the desk for the message (It was, of course, pre-voicemail).

By the time I came along, in the mid-80's, it was less and less reliable, and they couldn't get parts for it. It was evenutally replaced by a computer system that was integrated into the phone system - a maid would just dial a number when she was in the room, and dial it again when she was done, to the same effect.

I was thinking about that because I was staying at a small hotel over the weekend that was still manual in every respect - right down to the cash register and individual paper folio for each guest room. I'd forgotten how labor intensive that is.

While the new systems are much more accurate, less time-consuming, and are almost error-proof (which is a very good thing - there was nothing worse than giving a guest a key to a room and realizing after they left that the room was already occupied) it's one of those old mechanical systems that are fascinating in all their moving parts. I've never seen a system before or since that operated like that, and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with one.

 

[scott55405]

Just out of curiosity, did the hotel you stayed at recently have "real" keys? Can't remember the last time I saw that. I remember when your message light would be on the wall, but don't recall ever seeing anything resembling what you mentioned for housekeeping. I can only imagine how much must have gone into all the recordkeeping when all the billing and various requests would have been done manually.

I have noticed over years that you can do more and more with the phones in hotel rooms on a self-service basis. As recently as the mid 1980s I stayed at places that had a switchboard with the patch cords and the room phones with no dials (you went directly to the operator, who would either help with your request or dial an outside call for you).

There's a small neighborhood gay bar nearby that still uses one of those big shiny chrome National cash registers that were the gold standard in bars and restaurants in the 60s and 70s.

 

[dalangdon]

Oh yeah - real keys and everything. Which are both a pain and a security risk.

Unless you saw the maid use the system, you probably wouldn't even realize it was there. The panel in the room was about the size of a double light switch box. It had (as I recall) a green box, a red box and a blue box, each about a half inch by half inch, as well as the red button.

Bookkeeping was incredibly complex. For instance, to record a long-distance call, you waited for the AT&T operator in Colorado to call you. She would rattle off the room number, time of call, and toll quite quickly and then hang up. You had to write that all down on a slip, manually figure the hotel surcharge, pull the room's folio, bring it up in the cash register, enter the previous balance, enter the new charge, put the phone slip in the register to record the entry on that as well, and then file the phone slip back with the folio.

Room service and restaurant charges had to be entered in a similar manner. If the guest disputed charges you had to back out everything, which was the same an entering a charge, only doing it backwards

Of course, the early computer systems were almost as bad. One little mistake could throw your balance off by thousands, and you had to retrace everything back. As a shift manager, I had to sign off on discrepancies in the till versus the register or computer system. With the register, it would never be more than a few bucks at most. In the early days of the computer system we would sometimes be off by twenty or thirty thousand dollars.