COLUMN: Life at the Bates Motel

By Tobin Barnes
My world of work began as a seven-year-old at the motel my parents leased in my hometown. Eventually I graduated into my perfect kid-type job suggested, offhand-like but clairvoyantly, by Rocky the car dealer.
   
Among my first jobs at the motel, other than sheepishly placing leaflets advertising the motel under car windshield wipers at the World’s Only Corn Palace (would there ever be a reason for another corn palace?), I was the motel’s first switchboard operator.
   
This wasn’t exactly at the dawn of electronic communication, but, yeah, the motel had a switchboard, whereby guests who wanted to talk to the outside world had to first call down to the office to obtain a old-fashioned “line.”
   
And I’m not promoting myself as a mechanical wunderkind, but I, as a seven-year-old, was the first in the family to learn to operate the beast. Then, some short time later, under my patient tutelage, came my mother, and after that, my brothers, who were supremely unmotivated to be clerks, especially since their much younger brother was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about the whole thing.
   
Bringing up the rear--days, if not weeks, later--was my old man. Necessity being the mother of education, he eventually conceded that I might require a life away from the switchboard and finally grew accustomed to the finer points of inserting this plug into this hole and that plug into that hole.
   
Being the seven-year-old disembodied voice of the motel early on and much of the time thereafter, I can only imagine what kind of rinky-dink or child-labor exploiting joint the guests thought they’d checked into. 
   
But then, if they had rented the room through my old man, dressed in striped, bibbed overalls with or without a t-shirt underneath, they might have already thought they were spending a night at the Bates Motel and had prudently blocked their doors with furniture. I’m thinking many a nervous shower were taken in our rooms.
   
Speaking of advertising...well...maybe not just now but at the beginning when I mentioned those leaflets, my old man got another publicity brainstorm. He thought it would be great to put a billboard on the back of the family car informing the motoring public that our motel was three blocks north of the World’s Only Corn Palace.
   
And no big deal there...many businesses still do the same thing. But my old man had a way of taking the ordinary and spinning it into something bizarrely absurd.
   
Anyway, one or the other of my older brothers was ordered to take the car, sporting the billboard, for a spin around town, particularly where tourists thinking about lodging were likely to be and at the time they were likely to be there theoretically thinking these thoughts. Yeah, late afternoon or early evening.
   
Developing this hypothesis one step further, my old man evidently imagined Joe, the average tourist, making this or some-such statement to his wife: “Hey, Marge. See that advertisement up on the car ahead. I’m getting tired and I have no idea where we’re going to spend the night. How about going to that motel three blocks north of the World’s Only Corn Palace.”
   
“Yeah, Joe, maybe we should just follow them there.”
   
Yeah, uh huh, I agree. Well, it gets even freakier. Since I was usually riding along, my old man figured we might be accomplishing another task while we were out trolling for lunkers. He thought I should be checking other motels we drove past to see how many customers they had so he could eat his guts out about how few we had in relation.
   
It got down to where I was keeping a detailed tab on the number of cars in each motel parking lot so I could more accurately report the status of our current upsurge or decline in relation to the competition. Statistically speaking, that is.
   
Now you can see why I was so glad to eventually get the perfect kid-job that I’ll tell you about next time. Maybe.