Security, privacy and personal electronics

The BlackBerry Curve 8350i

Training venues and personal electronics: In the training areas (gyms, pools and encounter sallies) at St Lucy’s and our escort center as well as Adolph’s facilities (Splash, and The Lorelei) no personal electronics are allowed for security and privacy reasons. It isn’t that big a deal at St Lucy’s. Security simply put jammers in the prohibited areas, but at Splash men complained, because many had been surreptitiously taking pics of the Towel Girls with the cams on their cells. Now the guys are given a choice leave their personal electronics with security before entering the club or be banned. At The Lorelei a few business women complained, but their need for the pampering, security and erotic delights available only at TL overcame their cell phone separation anxiety. Especially when they realized they needed to be safe from being photographed in a sweat soaked leo or while mounted by a favorite stallion. How to handle member’s personal electronic use while on premises has the training/health club industry split over asking members not to use their devices and hoping for the best or to put a zero tolerance policy in place. Having decided on zero tolerance Adolph hasn’t lost any business so it was the right business decision and in the long run avoids lawsuits for invasion of privacy by means of personal electronics.

A vaginal toning program at Splash: In keeping with well known Germanic training efficiency Splash has started a vaginal training program for all the Towel-Girls. The girls call it ‘very tight pussy’ training and it had been available as a training option for about a year, but was found to be so effective that it has been made mandatory. I think it was a good idea because it will standardize the intensity of the experience clients should expect to get at Splash. And for what they are charged that’s a very good thing! Inga was to teach the course and use training balls, Ben W sets, and Kegel trainers in addition to other devices to tighten and measure the strength of vaginal muscles.

However, since Inga’s death [For more about that see my December 18, 2011post entitled: Breeding diaphragms and ‘death rubber’] Abi, manager of Adolph’s Spa, The Lorelei, will be teaching the course until he can find a replacement for Inga. Most of the methods and equipment are the same as those I’ve been using to train escorts as well as my circle of friends who wanted to be able to ripple grip a partner to orgasm in spite of any attempt on his part to prevent ejaculation.

Of course, that’s why Cyndi progressed so rapidly up through the ranks of the Towel-Girls despite her youth and relative inexperience. Her apparent youth (though she is well over the age of consent in Nevada) her seeming innocence and the skill with which she uses her unbelievably strong vaginal muscles make her the most sought-after TG for servicing diving and breeding fetishists and the envy of the other girls.

FROM A SOURCE YOU CAN TRUST … NOT!

Saudi Gazette
December 19, 2011
By Mohannad Sharawi

Birth control pills are 99% safe: Doctors

“JEDDAH – Birth control pills are safe and do not cause medical complications such as blood clots and infertility, according to doctors who attended a medical seminar here recently.

Dr. Hisham Arab, secretary general of the Saudi Obstetrics and Gynecology Society (SOGS), said that studies conducted over the last six months by the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) showed that there is no relationship between the pills and blood clots. He added that other family planning pills on the Saudi market are also safe.

Dr. Abdul Hafiz Khoja, a family medicine consultant, said rumors about the safety of certain products were the result of a “dirty trade war” between rival pharmaceutical companies.

Khoja said that SOGS had recently issued a medical bulletin to all obstetricians and gynecologists in the Kingdom confirming the integrity of such pills and outlining supporting scientific evidence.

“All the latest experiments and research conducted by many research centers and scientific bodies around the world have revealed and confirmed that family planning pills are 99.99 percent safe. These medicines are also known to prevent women from contracting some diseases especially cancer.”

Khoja said that research from the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that these pills are safer than other forms of contraception such as intrauterine devices (IUD) and injections. The FDA also rejected rumors that using such pills for long periods may cause infertility.

Dr. E’etedal Idrees, a faculty member at Dar Al-Hekma College, said the medical rumors are dangerous. “We should verify the news we receive from unknown sources especially from the Internet.”

He said that he tested birth controls pills such as Jasmine and found it to be safe. “I also talked to the SFDA here and asked them if they ordered the withdrawal of such pills from the Saudi market. Their response was negative.” ”

Personal Comment: This was written after the publicity in mid December when an FDA review board recommended stronger warnings on oral contraceptives containing the progestin drospirenone and on Ortho Evra, the Patch. It puts a different spin on the fact that an estimated 10 in 10,000 women will have a serious adverse event while taking pills containing Drospirenone. You have to love the male dominated society’s arrogant certainty in the opening sentence, even though it’s stretching the truth. There is a small (but absolute) increase in blood clots associated with all combined (estrogen/progestin) contraceptives and the risk with some progestins, like drospirenone, is greater than with others.

Edited on January 15th to reply to comment: First, Google/Blogger has (again) inserted bugs into the system while trying to introduce the Two Level comments feature, which in their wisdom they’ve made mandatory! Apparently the coders don't have the time to thoroughly test such a complicated feature before deploying it... Sigh! I hadn't opted to use 2-level, but I seem to have been caught in the process of trying to fix the initial problem so I'm locked out of replying to comments posted to blog entries, at least for now. So until the problem is fixed I'll be replying to comments as an edit, unless that gets fucked up too...

More Strauss-Kahn fallout

Hotel housekeeping staff at work

The New York Times
May 20, 2011
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Sexual Affronts a Known Hotel Hazard

A lot of people were shocked by the charges that the head of the International Monetary Fund sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper in New York last weekend.

But housekeepers and hotel security experts say that housekeepers have long had to deal with various sexual affronts from male guests, including explicit comments, groping, guests who expose themselves and even attempted rape.

“These problems happen with some regularity,” said Anthony Roman, chief executive of Roman & Associates, a Long Island company that advises hotels on security matters. “They’re not rare, but they’re not common either.”

Hotels are reluctant to discuss such incidents, but security experts say the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the I.M.F. chief, will prompt some hotel managers to review their security practices to better protect their housekeeping staff.

Zemina Cuturic, a refugee from Bosnia who works at the Tremont Chicago Hotel, said she remained frightened whenever she had to clean Room 410 because of what happened there a year ago. She was vacuuming, she said, and the guest, who had left the room minutes earlier, suddenly reappeared and “reached to try to kiss me behind my ear.”

“I dropped my vacuum, and then he grabbed my body at the waist, and he was holding me close,” Ms. Cuturic recalled. She persuaded the guest to let her go, and she fled. “It was very scary,” she said. Ms. Cuturic reported the incident to hotel management, but decided against going to the police. “I was kind of scared that he’d come back the next day if I did,” she said.

A Tremont official said the hotel, part of the Starwood chain, has a full-time security guard whose only job is to watch over the housekeeping staff. In the incident that Ms. Cuturic described, the official said that management confronted the man and insisted that he leave the hotel.

Housekeepers, nearly all of whom are women, talk of guests who offer them $100 or $200 for sex, apparently thinking that the maids, often low-paid immigrants, are desperate to earn more money. Some women complain of episodes in which they were bending over to, say, clean a bathtub, and a guest sneaked up and stuck his hand up their skirt.

Tom Whitlatch, president of Risk Services, a security consulting firm, said many hotel companies were taking a new look at safety after the accusations against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who has resigned from the I.M.F. to focus on fighting the charges against him.

“I can assure you that the big hotel chains are aware of this incident and are saying, ‘We need to make sure our housekeepers are trained about this and we’re doing enough to prevent things like this from happening,’ ” he said.

Mr. Whitlatch said that there was little that hotels could do to prevent some of the incidents, but that training and good security procedures could reduce the risks to housekeepers.

Kathryn Carrington, a retired housekeeper who worked 30 years at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, recalled several occasions when she went into a room to clean, only to have a male guest emerge from the shower in his bathrobe, which then suddenly opened.

In one case, she said, a guest propositioned her, saying, “I see a pretty dark girl. Can you do something for me?” Ms. Carrington acknowledged that she used to carry a can opener with her in case she ever needed to defend herself from a guest.

The Grand Hyatt’s management was very supportive, she said. “They’d tell you, ‘If any situation occurred, get to the nearest phone and call the supervisor and leave the room. Someone else will help you do the room,’ ” she said.

The Hyatt Corporation declined an interview request, but said in a statement, “The safety and security of guests and associates is one of our top concerns.” It noted that its hotels employed many security measures and safety protocols. “Any time an associate raises a concern, we take it very seriously, promptly investigate the situation and follow as appropriate,” the company said.

Andria Babbington, a union safety official and a former room attendant at a major Toronto hotel, said at least five guests exposed themselves to her during her 17 years in housekeeping. She remembers once having to deliver a bathrobe to a guest who had called for one. “I knocked on the door. He said, ‘Come in,’ and I saw the guest had no clothes on,” she said. “He asked whether I could touch a certain part of his body.”

Some safety experts recommend that hotels send a male employee to deliver bathrobes or blankets when guests call for them, although they say that even male hotel workers are occasionally grabbed or propositioned by female guests.

There is also debate about whether an open or closed door is safer for a housekeeper cleaning a room.

Mr. Whitlatch recommends that housekeepers keep the door closed, saying that makes it harder for an outsider to enter to attack them or to steal the guest’s belongings. If the guest enters with a key, he said, the housekeeper should return later to finish the room.

But some maids disagreed, saying an open door can discourage a guest from misbehaving because another guest might be walking by outside.

“Keeping it wide open is the best option,” Ms. Babbington said. “When the door is shut, no one knows you’re inside.”

Ms. Carrington, the retired Grand Hyatt housekeeper, said the smartest approach was to keep the door open with the cart wedged in the doorway. “If someone comes into the room, they have to move the cart, and you hear it,” she said.

The Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine, Calif., mandates closed doors during cleaning — a policy that bothers Argelia Rico, a housekeeper there. She recalled an incident in 2009 when she was cleaning a bathroom and the guest walked in. “He asked me to change the sheets, and he went to the living room,” she said. “I was bending over tucking in the sheets, and suddenly he had come up right behind me. He was naked.”

She said the man lay down on the bed, aroused, and asked her to leave. “I was very scared because he could have just locked the door and raped me,” she said.

Christopher Daly, a spokesman for HEI Hotels & Resorts, which manages the hotel in Irvine, said it had no record of such an incident. “If any such activity, including sexual assault, was brought to our attention, we at the hotel would contact authorities ourselves, whether or not the employee asked us to or was planning to file charges,” he said.

Guests are not the only threat to housekeepers. Police in the Washington area suspect that a still-unidentified attacker raped seven housekeepers in a series of incidents several years ago.

Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers union, Unite Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to report incidents to management or the police. Sometimes they fear that management, often embracing the motto “the customer is always right,” will believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may end up getting fired.

Ms. Babbington said a co-worker once encountered a naked guest who chased her around the room. “She was just panicking,” Ms. Babbington said. “She was very new in the country and she demanded to talk to the police. Her manager sat her down to calm her down and told her not to call the police, that it wouldn’t be good for the hotel.”

Personal comment: This is something the Hotel/Resort industry really doesn’t want to talk about since no property wants to get the reputation of having sexual attacks occurring on the premises, though we all know that a certain amount of it does occur. Because Vegas is a party and convention town you might expect that we would see a higher incidence of this sort of behavior, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Perhaps because encounters are so easily arranged in any of the thousands of bars cabarets and lounges in town.