Zombie Hostel

Zombies are very fashionable at the moment. There’s a popular new TV show here involving zombies and a host of computer games, parades and all kinds of other undead stuff. In keeping with this theme, Rossland has a zombie hostel. Not in the sense that it is a hostel for zombies, because the undead do not shower, sleep, or use communal cooking facilities. Instead this hostel is what a hostel would be if it was infected with zombie-ness. “But that’s absurd”, you’re no doubt saying, “How can a hostel be like a zombie?”

Let’s start with:

1) Disaggregated decision making

Zombies are characterised by a breakdown of the usual decision making processes. Instead of the brain acting as a centre of thought and decision making, zombies’ body parts are animated and governed locally. Each limb and organ within a zombie makes its own decisions and regulates its own behaviour. The actions of the organism as a whole are determined by broad, common desires that are shared between the decision making loci within each body part. This explains both a zombie’s inability to formulate and act upon complex intentions and their durability. Since a zombie’s arm is self-regulating, it will continue to hunt for fresh brains even after it has been severed from the rest of the organism. Zombies act the way they do because each of their constituent parts wants to eat brains, shamble around and moan.

This disaggregated decision making structure also applies to the hostel in Rossland. This hostel is unique in all the businesses I have ever seen in that it seems to have no centralised decision-making system or any way of assigning responsibility or tasks to its staff members. In most business there is a boss, an owner, a manager, or someone who basically decides what’s going to be done. Here, no one decides what will be done. Instead, there are four people loosely affiliated with the hostel, none of whom seem to take any kind of meaningful responsibility for the operation of the place. Somehow the actions of these people magically coincide to ensure that when things do inevitably catch fire (and a few small things have caught fire while I’ve been here) nothing of importance burns down.

For reasons I don’t properly understand the people who would normally assume responsibility and command in this situation don’t do so. And the people who are left over, to whom decision-making power might conceivably fall, are not really empowered to fill this void. I am one of the people who might possibly be expected to take up such a managing role but I don’t actually get paid to work here and I certainly have no idea how the business normally operates. It thus seems slightly unreasonable for me to, say, decide to spend the owners money replacing the chairs with ones that are bit less fall-overy.

The net result of this is that the hostel stumbles ever onward, maintaining the basic functions required to keep operating without ever performing any of its tasks well. Each process that the hostel relies on has been put together by a number of different people over the last twelve months without any of those people every communicating their thoughts and intentions to the other “staff”.

For example: If you go to clean the bathrooms you’ll find that someone bought a massive tub of toxic cleaning goo a year ago. Someone else found this tub some time later, but couldn’t find any sponges, so they used an old tea-towel to apply said cleaning agent. Realising that the next person would also have no sponges, they kindly left the tea-towel in the tub of toxic goo. When you finally unearth the tub some months later, the tea-towel has partly dissolved into the goo, leaving a kind of crusty discoloured residue. This raises concerns about the safety of the goo, and you buy a box of latex gloves – bequeathing this to the next person who comes to clean the bathrooms. Eventually, the goo will run out before the gloves do, and someone will be left trying to rub the filth off the sides of the showers with nothing but a pair of latex gloves. At this stage, the toilets will go uncleaned indefinitely.

I should say that it’s great that zombies lack the capacity to plan and actualise complex tasks. Otherwise they could ride bicycles, and that would be bad. However, if this hostel could plan and actualise complex tasks, I might not have had to install 20 light bulbs when I first started working here. And my room might have had a door handle. And those guests who turned up the other day might not have left with a grumpy look after their first night when they’d booked to stay longer. Who can say?

This common organisational trait also explains another similarity between this hostel and a zombie:

2) A dishevelled appearance

Zombies need to look shabby. The whole point of being undead is that you get to let yourself go a little. You can bleed and rot and have bits falling off and no one will ask you dress more appropriately for work tomorrow. Zombies can handle the small, day to day tasks of shambling around, eating brains and wearing enough clothes to cover their naughty bits (consider: you never see zombie naughty bits – and if you’re about to send me some website that proves me wrong I’d rather you didn’t), but if one of their limbs falls off they don’t really have the capacity to stop shambling and sort that out.

In a similar fashion, this hostel is quite run down in many ways. Brad and I (the two grunts who stay here for free in exchange for a few hours work a day) can keep the usual tasks of washing sheets and cleaning the kitchen ticking over. We cannot, however, fix the window in my room that is supposed to be double glazed but instead manages to be single glazed in a way that allows a continuous stream of cold air to blow in from outside. Nor can we fix the heaters that don’t work in some guest rooms. Nor, it seems, can we authorise the annual audit of our fire safety system, which worries me a little.

These cosmetic challenges would normally hinder a hostel. Potential guests might decide to stay elsewhere, robbing us of valuable funds. Fortunately, the third zombie feature of this business steps in to save the day, because this hostel...

3) Does not require normal sustenance

Zombies do not seem to require food. Yes, they certainly seem to like to eat brains, but it doesn’t look like they suffer too much if there aren’t any brains going around. Similarly, this hostel manages to survive with no guests. I’d say we have a paying guest here (and I literally mean a single paying guest) maybe 50% of nights. We’d be pretty damn fortunate to have two guests at once. Three people? All paying? At once? Certainly not on my watch. That means this whole building generates a whopping $100-ish of revenue a week. If that’s not an iron clad get-quick-scheme then I don’t know what is.

Of course, the most important test of the zombie-ness of this hostel would be to see if it would devour the brains of any other hostels in town. However, there ARE no other hostels in town. Coincidence? I think not.