Imagine the situation. You are staying in London on business or pleasure. You have had a long day and have travelled a long way. You are staying in a hotel, which being London, will almost certainly be expensive but hopefully will be quite comfortable.
What could be better than getting into your hotel room and have a nice hot shower or bath ?
On the surface, there is nothing wrong but the lessons from this London office point to hidden dangers.
Opposite our office in an expensive part of London is a quite an expensive hotel. It is not particularly well-known or special. However it is a good hotel where people stay if they are on business or maybe even on a high cost holiday.
This hotel provides regular entertainment for the “work-seekers” in our office. Guests in various states of undress naively think that no one is looking in through their third or fourth floor windows. Anyone who has worked in our office would realise this is a fundamental error. Lots of people maybe looking through the windows. In fact on occasions a whole office of people will be looking !
I have been out of the office for sometime but recently I exchanged emails with my Spanish colleague aka Latino Lothario. He informed me all was well but reported there had been a naked woman spotted in one of the rooms of the hotel. He wrote that everyone had been looking at her. LL stated simply she had been quite young and worth looking at. He suggested I contact Charles, our well-informed but slightly letcherous Treasury colleague for further details.
I emailed Charles, regarding the fact that I am soon to be leaving the office for another job (more to follow on this subject) and asking, in passing, about the hotel nude.
Charles responded that I had missed a good day in the office and expanded that there had been “lesbian action” in the room. This fact had not been noted at all by Latino Lothario. If there had been some tangible event it seems unlikely he wouldn’t have reported it.
I can therefore only assume that Charles was interpreting some feature of this girl to conclude that she was a lesbian. Maybe a visiting maid was seen in the room or maybe she just looked like a lesbian to Charles.
Anyway it illustrates the point that even as a completely unknown person, if you fail to draw your curtains in a London hotel room that can be seen from an office, you may well be shamelessly watched regardless of your state of dress. Also a conclusion, fair or unfair, will be made about you.
Not all hotel visitors are so alluring for the likes of Charles and Latino Lothario e.g. the portly middle aged man who emerged completely naked (and wet) from his bathroom only to dry off his back (all parts of his back) standing next to the window. Howls of agony could be heard from Charles and others as this flabby man dried his bottom, blissfully unaware that about 10 people were watching him. It was an unpleasant sight for all to behold.
An older woman appeared partially undressed. Charles announced she was not worth looking at (in contrast to the middle aged man above who was watched continually ??!!).
The most famous incident in our office which is now part of office legend was when a girl (said to be 18 by Charles) applied all-over body moisturiser to herself for around 30 minutes.
I missed this but saw her later sitting in a tracksuit looking out of her window.
The same afternoon and in the next room a bare chested man appeared in short tennis shorts, drawing back his curtain. At that point an element of fear crept in that this was too (good) unlikely to be true and as it was Comic Relief day it was feared that the office was being “set-up” by a camera trained back on the office to record the reactions of those inside to various hotel residents.
We never found up if it was a set up but it was certainly a sobering thought that the residents could fight back and film us watching them.
But unless you are planning to film the workers in an office react to you for documentary/artistic/personal purposes or unless you are an exhibitionist, remember that office facing hotels windows in London most certainly have eyes !!
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1 comment:
Sounds like you've got some real perverts in your office.
reminds me of the time I was having a good time with boyfriend in a hotel in Rome. Only later i realise we were watched by a group of Italian builders from the building accross the road.
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