I suppose the internet should have taught me that there’s all kinds of people out there, but I can’t actually imagine making this mistake. And I make LOTS of pigheaded mistakes! I don’t mean to insult you if you have, I’m just… yeah.
I guess I just don’t use a valet often enough to assume they’re magic. Still, I must admit that with the prevalence of very distracted people in this world this must happen sometimes. I’m kind of confused as to why a spare valet wouldn’t go dash into the building and ask for their keys instead, though. I mean, I’d rather talk to a harried person for ten seconds than jack up a car and wheel it into a parking garage, possibly damaging any number of things including said car.
I doubt you’d ever find the person after they entered the casino through the porte cochere. The entrance is designed to quickly whisk you away from the doors and deep into the bowels of the building, straight to the casino floor. Once the driver/car owner is out of your sight, it could be days before they’ll surface again.
And I suspect no casino is willing to piss off their patrons by tagging them with a towing bill. If they’ve dropped enough cash over the weekend, it’ll be comped for sure, in which case the point of the tow charge is lost and no lesson learned.
The better solution is to have enough car jockeys on staff at all times that whenever a car pulls up into the porte cochere, someone’s standing there to liberate the keys from the driver once they step out of the car.
Unfortunately, if there’s a rival business across the street, and you hammer one of your customers over a mistake on their part, they may very well take their business across the street, where the people are “nice”.
I’ve seen enough people get out of their cars at Kroger or Wal-Mart still talking busily on their cell phones and absent-mindedly doing something-or-other automatically with their car keys (drop into pocket, purse) that I could quite easily visualize it happening at a casino, especially if what you’re saying on your cell is, “I’m at the casino now, gonna go in there and win big, yeah baby…”
Like McNew said, the best solution is to have enough valets on duty that you can have someone rush over there and intercept them.
I usually go to the Borgata and use the valets when I am staying there over night. There has never been a time when there wasn’t a valet opening the door for me or my wife as we stopped. If they don’t get the keys (which has never happened) it is their fault. And the French word thingy they are under is big enough to handle a fleet of cars that are left behind. Sounds like he is working at Joe’s Generic Casino.
I’ve automatically removed and pocketed my keys when taking it in for an oil change on more than one occasion. Muscle memory does it for me – stop car, put it in park, remove key, unbuckle, open door, stand up, key in pocket. It’s not necessarily a stupid thing, although it is a “not paying attention” thing, which may be a somewhat fine distinction.
Lame pitting. The guy isn’t admitting to messing with cars for recreational purposes, he’s admitting that he sometimes goes out of his way to do his job.
I suggest “Would the owner of the black Lexus registration XYZ1234 please go to the valet station. There is a major problem with your vehicle” blasted at 5 second intervals over the casino tannoy.
Go back and check out the links. In fact, he does open up the bonnet, poke around the engine, paw through storage bins, fiddle with controls, et cetera. And then he writes up a series of totally worthless “reviews” detailing his actions. This is not “[going] out of his way to do his job,” which is parking a car in a secure location; this is taking liberties with other peoples’ vehicles.
And every place where I’ve used valet parking the valet is right there at the driver’s side door, handing you a ticket and taking the keys in the case that they haven’t been left in the ignition. I don’t know what kind of cut-rate Quonset hut bingo-and-bandit casino this guy works at, but they need to hire some valets who aren’t too stoned to do their job, rather than guys who break into cars, bypass the ignition (good luck doing that on many modern computer-controlled ignitions), and paw through the owners stuff and around the engine compartment.
I did check out the links. I just went back and checked them again in case I missed something. Nope, I didn’t. I get that you’re freaked out by the idea that someone might be looking under the hood of your car, but I’m not. He’s fairly clear that he’s not looking at things generally regarded as private (the contents of the trunk, for example). With regard to the second link, he is trying to figure out how to move a car without having the keys. As I posted before, I can completely understand how someone might unthinkingly remove the keys, and it only takes a few seconds for someone to get out of earshot. Even the high-end casinos are going to have busy nights where there is one more customer than there are valets on duty at the time.
If you’re having fun with your recreational outrage, go you. I’m still over here in the “lame pitting” camp.
This is patently untrue. He explicitly stated that he never looks in the trunk and only looks in the glove compartment in the owner’s presence and with the owner’s express permission and with the intention of assuring that the owner is indeed the owner and not a thief. You’re also out of line in implying that Enola Straight is stoned at work. If he stated anywhere that he’s regularly (or even irregularly) high at work, you should provide a cite for that, too.
I can see where you’d be uncomfortable with a valet looking under your hood, and, truth be told, I’d probably be unhappy if a valet did that to my car. But you’re blowing this out of proportion.
What does that first link have to do with opening a hood? All Enola Straight mentioned there was opening a glovebox, in the presence of the owner of the car.
Okay, and, in the second link, he’s just asking for a way to move a car on his lot that needs to be moved, in a situation in which the owner of the car has implicitly given his/her permission for the Valet service to move the car around on the lot. He’s asking how to do this when he doesn’t have keys, without breaking anything.
Are you sure you’ve given the right links? This does not describe the links you gave, not even in the ballpark.
ETA: Aha, the link is slightly defective. You’ve linked to post number 21, when you should link to the top of the thread. Now your pitting makes a little more sense to me.
Unless you’re a mechanic and/or I’ve given you express permission, opening the bonnet of my car when you’re a parking monkey only tasked with moving it from one place to another constitutes fucking with it. Do you think the car owners would be pleased or amused to read his “reviews” of their property - or the management of the casino, for that matter?
Try reading:“Parking the car and looking under the hood, I discovered why: at the top of each shock/strut tower was an electrical wire, leading from the shock absorber to some control box somewhere unseen. I theorize these wires continually adjust the shock’s damping rate and/or internal pressure as part of some electronic active suspension.”
Inexpertly trying to move a modern all-wheel drive car can easily damage the transmission. So can moving some types of CVT-equipped vehicles without appropriately disengaging the Park setting, which may require keys in the ignition. And rolling a car around on a caster dolly on uneven asphalt (they’re intended only to be used on flat, hard concrete surfaces like the floor of a service bay) is such an astonishingly dim-witted thing to do, particularly for an inexperienced person who is likely to either damage the undercarriage, the valet, or perhaps both, that it doesn’t even bear consideration. Tow truck drivers are bonded and insured to move vehicles; will the casino employing Enola Straight do this?
He’s not a locksmith, tow truck driver, mechanic, or law enforcement officer. He doesn’t have any business opening the hood, breaking into the car, bypassing the ignition, et cetera. His business is to take the keys–catching the owners before they wander off leaving the car inconveniently parked–and park the car. Not inspect it, interrogate it, jack it up, tow it around, fiddle with the buttons and dials, et cetera.
This (along with most of your subsequent comments) is irrelevant, as he was asking for a way to do it which would not damage the car. So any way to do it which can easily damage the car is not the kind of thing he was asking for.
I think you’re right to be uncomfortable about the opening of the hood (though from that thread, anyway, it appears any car owners aren’t so concerned). But the thing about moving cars without keys, I just don’t see the problem. As long as he’s not risking damaging the car, no problem–and he asked specifically for methods which do not risk damaging the car.
Which indicates that he does not know what he is going. As with begging medical or legal advice, this is really something one should learn by immediate direct example from someone who does know what they’re doing, rather than asking questions on a message board. And again, before one starts lifting up and moving someone else’s vehicle about, one should probably have the financial and liablity protections. As for breaking into a vehicle and bypassing the ignition, I’m pretty certain that if this is done without legal writ or under the direction of a police officer, it is illegal, regardless of where the individual in question parked the car. Whether he damages it or not, it’s not a “no problem”; it’s a amateurish, overreaching valet. There’s likely a reason the dreaded management does not provide tools and equipment for doing this.
