Fortunately in my real estate sales career I have not gotten into any truly dangerous situations. The real estate sales profession can be very dangerous though, especially for women. I’ve read more than one real life account of a woman lured to a vacant house by an evil man with bad intent posing as a buyer. If Realtors don’t do their diligence when meeting clients for the first time, the consequences can be disastrous. Vetting people with requests for lender pre-approval, and initial meetings at the office where the staff can get a good look at the potential client are best safety practices in the industry.
My most harrowing workplace situations came when I was working at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco. I helped re-open the Palace in 1991 and worked there into 1998. Lots of crazy and fun stuff happened at the Palace, and the time I was night manager on duty during a riot between two wedding parties was out of control. A dozen or so brawlers literally spilled out of the two adjoining ballrooms and into the main foyer along with many of the wedding guests. It was a mob scene and we had to call SFPD. With a recently dislocated shoulder I actually got between two of the fighters to break up their action, nearly further damaging my shoulder in the altercation.
Risking a limb is one thing, but risking your life is another. Another time as the night manager I had to lay off one of the overnight staff who HR believed was potentially violent. They were so frightened of him the HR director did not want to call him into his office during the day or come to the hotel at night to do the deed. After he was let go, HR posted a security guard outside the employee entrance for a month. I knew he was a potential threat, but I also had a fairly good relationship with him. I never got on him for anything because he was perfectly adequate with the guests. In fact, he seemed consistently polite. Then again, I wasn’t privy to his HR file and I was never told the details on why we were letting him go. I knew there had been friction with his own manager who also didn’t want to do the deed. I was the least likely person he would lash out at.
When I called him into the back office at the beginning of his shift, I was genuinely terrified. But I knew somebody had to step up, and I remember thinking at the time I didn’t have kids so if I got killed it wouldn’t be the worst-case scenario. In one sense my fears were overblown. He took the news well, almost like he was expecting it. He was pleasant enough under the circumstances, and I had security escort him to the locker room and out of the building.
In another sense he may have been crazy AF, as a few weeks later we received a series of bomb threats on the hotel. The caller would dial into the main switchboard and tell the operator there was a bomb in the building. She’d call security and the alarm system would start whooping throughout the hotel. It was very intense at first, but we got used to it after the first couple times and realized the caller was simply getting satisfaction (payback?) out of disrupting operations. I was manager on duty during both day and night shifts at the time, and we had to evacuate the hotel each time a threat was made. Diners in the Garden Court and the Pied Piper restaurants, as well as hotel guests, event attendees and employees would all spill out onto the sidewalk while Palace security and SFPD came by and checked the public areas for suspicious packages.
It was never proven that the guy I fired was also the bomb threat guy. The calls stopped coming in, maybe because SFPD started breathing down his neck. And life at the Palace went back to normal crazy fun.