"I'm going to stay up tonight," he announced. "I'll sit in the doorway
or walk around just outside the office door where they can't help
seeing me, and I'll bet a horned toad I can bring us in three or four
extra customers!"
And he did. His theory had been correct; people who hesitated about
selecting a motel after midnight, who hated to rouse anyone from bed,
came to our motel like flies to a dish of honey when they saw that our
inside lights were on and there was someone up and moving about.
Grant kept that up for three nights, sleeping from dawn until it was
time to go to work, and sleeping again from the time he got home until
about ten o'clock. And for those three nights we averaged fifteen
dollars more per night than our average for the previous nights had
been. Our motel was catching at least ninety per cent of the late
travelers who stopped on the east side of the business district.
(During his night vigils, Grant saw what a small percentage of them
went into any of the other motels around us.)
Of course, Grant couldn't keep that up, though. He was earning less
than fifteen dollars a day digging trenches for the contractor;
obviously, then, since he could do only one, the most sensible course
would be for him to quit his job, sleep days, and spend the night
pulling customers in off the highway.
So he quit his job, and began to stay up every night, sleeping seven or
eight hours during the day. That left him time to help me clean the
cabins, and to do the watering. Business continued substantially
better, and life began to look brighter. We were afraid that
neighboring motel owners, suffering from the slump as we had done,
would imitate our methods and so distribute the customers more evenly
and more thinly. But perhaps they never realized what we were doing;
the weeks slipped past, and still Grant was the only one up during the
tiny hours; and our motel continued to get more night business than all
the others put together.
Grant was still as full as ever of good ideas. The walls of the showers
in two of the cabins were beginning to get moldy, and even after he had
scraped off the mold and painted them with a special damp-resistant
paint, there was a faintly musty smell lingering in those cabins.
He took a bottle of my perfume and put a little on the back of each
chair and on the drapes. Although the perfume didn't obliterate the
musty odor, it blended with it--as Grant had hoped it would--so that
the result was far from unpleasant. We tested the scent by going out of
the cabins and coming back into them from the fresh air outside after a
few minutes. The cabins had a faint, warmly sweet fragrance. Grant
touched them up with additional drops of perfume for a few days until
the musty odor wore off.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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