The Case Of The Missing Turkeys At The Washington Plaza Hotel

Click on the picture above to enlarge it.

This is a story about some missing turkeys at The Washington Plaza Hotel back in the day.
This happened sometime around 1988 or so.

The hotel used to give a Christmas party for all the employees with free food and drink. And that included alcoholic beverages. There was always a jolly good time with music and dancing. But some of the help drank too much and would argue over who was going to dance with who. Sometimes this would lead to fights.
Plus the management became worried about liability of those driving home intoxicated. I know one engineer was drunk enough to get a DUI on his way home to Virginia.

So the Christmas parties were cancelled and word went out that all employees would receive a free turkey for Christmas instead.

These were frozen turkeys to be kept in a freezer across from the Security Office located by the employee entrance and exit.  
 The Security Officers were to hand out the turkeys and get the person to sign for them or in some cases sign for the person receiving the turkey. So far so good.
Except.    Lo and Behold we ran out of turkeys before everyone received one.
Turns out some of the Security Officers were giving them out to their friends outside the hotel and
maybe to friendly cab drivers who stopped by.
Maybe some took more than one turkey. Who knows?
It was quite an embarassment to the management and to the Director of Security. But more turkeys must have been acquired and the incident was soon forgotten.


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Security Officers Ejecting Unwanted Person From The Shoreham Hotel In Washington D.C.

When I worked at the Shoreham Hotel back in 1976 and 1977 I was told to put certain people out of the Hotel. One was working as a assistant executive steward. He was passing out leaflets for the Socialists Workers Party. Since the hotel workers were already in a union I don't know exactly what he was up to except you can't pass out leaflets in the hotel. I went down in the sub sub basement to check him out. I told him he could not pass out leaflets in the hotel but that he was free to pass them out on the sidewalk outside the hotel.

He looked a little bit like Lee Harvery Oswald I thought. He had the same attitude of defiance. He started shouting look how these security are abusing me. I had not touched him or abused him in any way.
  I told him to leave and eventually he did.

  Another time I was hired by the American Bankers Association to work extra security for their convention. I was told there was an old lady who like to come and make trouble and it was our job to keep her out. I think this was a meeting of the ban Hanover's Trust. And she maybe was a small stockholder who wanted to make trouble for the powers that be. As far as I can remember she never showed up.

Now with almost everyone carrying a cell phone or camera that takes video and audio it raises the question of what expectation of privacy does someone have in a public place like a hotel lobby.
I don't think security officers can tell someone not to take a picture or video in a public area of the hotel. They can tell them not to but enforcing it would be difficult without banning the person from the hotel as is done in the video shown above.