What the fuck did I do to piss Karma off so bad??  Just once I'd like to sit down and write about how wonderful things are going.  I mean, lets take inventory: My daughter is hell bent on self-destruction, leaving me on pins and needles every single day of my life; my oldest son seems to be having one surgery after another and at some point I think the Navy will discharge him because he cannot possibly be meeting his job duties; I have been sick off and on for five years with a problem that can't be diagnosed, so the doctors agree it's time to cut my boob off; and now, the icing on the cake !
Through all of the trials and tribulations of life, I have always had one saving grace - my work. I have been blessed with some sort of business sense and for seventeen years I have had a track record of taking hotel properties over and making very good producers for  the owners.  Little did I know the very thing that made me one of the top paid hotel managers for limited service hotels would now set me in the cross hairs during one of the most financially trying times in history.
My current hotel is a very nice Hilton branded property.  When I took it over in February of 2009 it was just beginning to see the effects of what would be the horrible financial crunch of '09.  The rack rate (normally offered rate) was $179/night.  During the course of the next year, while mortgage companies failed, banks collapsed and people lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands, the hospitality industry saw drops of previously unheard of proportions.  Area rack rates began to plummet.  As other Hilton properties in the area dropped to crazy rates, I was proud that my hotel remained the leader of the competitive set.  Even though we have gone from $179 to $129, we remain #1 of 7 in the market.
 $50 difference in a room rate may not sound like much, but when you put it in perspective, taking into consideration that all group rates and other discounts float from that rate, you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.  Just because we remained #1 in the comp set doesn't mean that we didn't feel the economic impact of the crunch.  I had to lay off employees, cut hours, cut back on amenities and basically cut everything I could cut to stay afloat.  There are some costs that you simply cannot cut.  A hotel must have someone at the desk, they must have clean laundry and soap and shampoo for the guests.  When you cut everything that can possibly be cut and the hotel is running a high occupancy and you still are not flowing money to the bottom line, the hotel is not profitable.  This is the situation I have found myself in.  I have worked diligently to make sure everything that can be cut was.  Unfortunately, the only thing left to cut was salaried positions.  I proposed the elimination of two positions in my hotel that would save $66K a year.  This should put us back into a position of profitability. 
My boss requested a conference call yesterday to discuss my recommendations as he would present them to ownership.  What happened next blew me out of the water.  I'm still stunned.  He informed me that I had done a stellar job in keeping costs within line and controlling what could be controlled.  He also agreed that I should cut the position of my assistant.  He then informed me that I was the highest paid manager in our limited service portfolio and my salary was so out of line that he would be requesting a $25,000 cut for me.
WHAT THE FUCK?
Seventeen years of busting my ass to do a good job, building a reputation as a good prudent hotel manager, helping out with multiple properties while taking care of my own and feeling proud that someone acknowledged my hard work with a decent salary - now to be cut and belittled by a new fucker in our company that doesn't even know me??? Oh hell no.  I told him that I felt like my tenure, hard work and reputation warranted my salary and that I was not interested in taking a $25K a year pay cut.  He said that he would get with Human Resources Monday to see if he could proceed with the cut.
So, on top of every other lovely aspect of my life, now I am being rewarded for good work with a salary reduction. Nice.  Where are the razor blades? Seriously, I need to slit my wrists now.