put down the joint

In July, I blogged about a concierge who could only have been smoking pot.

Well, we met again. I went to feed a friend's cat and needed to get the key to his apartment from the concierge. I do this often enough that I know the key number and say it upfront to save the concierge the trouble of looking it up. No other concierge in the building has ever behaved in a way to make me suspect an altered state of consciousness, but this one has both times that I've interacted with him.

All numbers have been changed.

A.: Hi, my name is A. Could you please give me key #250, which is for 1910E? I'm on the list of people authorized to get the key.

Concierge looks up the key number for that apartment and hands me key #244.

A.: This is key number #244. The key for 1910E is #250.

Concierge looks up the key number again, acknowledges the mistake, and hands me the right key.

Had this been an isolated interaction, I would be willing to attribute it to something other than marijuana, but in conjunction with our earlier interaction, that is the most likely explanation.

I mean, keep in mind that he opted to look up the key number even though I'd provided it, and then proceeded to give me the wrong key. That's impressive.

This would have been worse had I not recognized it as the wrong key and gone all the way to the apartment (probably a ten minute walk from that desk) and back.

I guess the other explanation is that concierge is just a bad listener. Sure, I've seen people miss major pieces of information provided to them (including mom, although perhaps that is more a case of constructing an alternate reality and not letting incoming information get in the way), but those are almost always cases where a lot of information is exchanged. It's almost understandable that a piece of it will get lost, or that an interlocutor will tune out. But when conversing with someone for all of thirty seconds, especially when it's a business transaction, how hard is it to listen to every word? I counted twenty-five words, two of which were courtesy words, and the rest essential to the transaction we would have. What's so hard about paying attention?