☎️ Last Call

Every story has to end somewhere.

I just didn't expect mine to end with a handful of old voicemail messages.

A while back I was cleaning up old files and stumbled across a folder of saved voicemails from December 2018 — my final weeks at the Westin Seattle. I hadn't listened to them in years.

There they were.

The Messages

Listening to those messages now, they sound like ordinary hotel voicemails. Back then, I'd already made up my mind not to answer them. That part I should probably explain.

What Was Actually Going On

Earlier that year I'd finished my GIS Certificate at the University of Washington. Going back to school wasn't just something I wanted to do — it was something I needed to do.

I could see where the hotel business was headed. Cash was disappearing. Guests weren't carrying bills the way they used to. Getting away — that magical bellman term for catching the next tip — was happening less and less. The work hadn't changed. The math had.

I still loved the people. I just wasn't sure the job I'd loved for two decades was going to love me back.

Around October I spotted a one-year GIS contract opening at Zillow. It was exactly what I'd spent months learning. I applied. To my surprise, they called. There was paperwork, an interview at Zillow headquarters downtown — that's a story for another chapter — and then, right around Thanksgiving, I got the offer.

January 2, 2019. Just like that, I had my next life waiting for me.

The Hard Part

Now came the hard part: leaving the old one.

People always think resigning is easy. It isn't. Not after twenty-one years. Not after thousands of shifts, thousands of guests, thousands of coworkers, thousands of stories.

I'd grown up there. The Westin wasn't just where I worked — it was where I became an adult. Where I met lifelong friends. Where I learned how to read people, how to solve problems, how to stay calm when everything around you wasn't, how to laugh at three in the morning after the fifteenth impossible request of the night.

One afternoon I asked one of our dispatchers what she thought I should do. I hadn't even finished explaining the situation.

She was looking for her own way out too. She understood. Sometimes the people who love a place the most are also the first to recognize when it's time to leave it.

So I started making the rounds. My manager. HR. The hotel manager. The general manager. One by one I told them I was leaving. My paperwork was already in. I'd secretly hoped they wouldn't be disappointed. Instead, every single one of them was genuinely happy for me. There wasn't any guilt. No hard feelings. Just congratulations.

That surprised me. Maybe it shouldn't have. Hotels are funny places — people come and go every day. Guests, employees, managers, bellmen. Nobody stays forever. The best managers know that sometimes their job isn't keeping people. It's helping them leave well.

Why I Didn't Call Back

Here's the part I left out of the voicemail folder for a long time, even from myself.

The original plan, at least the one running in my head, was to work every shift right up through New Year's Day and then walk straight into Zillow on January 2nd without missing a beat. Twenty-one years of showing up — why stop now, even for the last two weeks?

Aimee had other ideas.

Her argument, more or less, was that I needed some rest before starting a new chapter like that. That covering for a couple of guys who couldn't make their own shifts wasn't going to do anybody any real good except the hotel. And that there was more going on underneath all of it than I was giving myself credit for — a couple decades of graveyard shifts and adrenaline finally catching up with me — and I needed to actually sit with that instead of powering through it one more time.

She was right, though it took me a minute to admit it.

So I didn't answer those calls. Not because I forgot, or slept through an alarm, or lost the schedule in my head. I saw them come in and let them go to voicemail on purpose. And on the 20th, I just stopped going back altogether. I only had a handful of working days left before the holidays anyway, and for the first time in a long time, I decided I wasn't giving them up.

Instead I kicked back. Read a few books I'd been putting off for years. Watched the Seahawks. Slept in — actually slept in, the way people who don't work graveyard shifts get to. Did all the ordinary end-of-year things everyone else takes for granted, while a new chapter sat there patiently waiting for January.

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The Keys

I didn't officially close things out until later in January. I went back one more time to finish checking out — turned in my ID badge, picked up my last paycheck, handled all the paperwork that comes with the end of a job like that.

By then, all those calls had been forgotten. Everyone was still just as happy for me as they'd been back in December, if not more. Nobody mentioned the missed shifts. There wasn't anything to forgive.

What I do remember from that last visit is the feeling. Walking through the lobby knowing it would soon belong to someone else. Hearing the familiar crackle of the radio one more time. Feeling that heavy ring of keys hanging from my belt — the same keys I'd carried for years. Some opened guest rooms. Some opened service hallways. Some opened mechanical spaces. A few, I'm still not convinced anybody ever knew what they opened. One of them opened a room I've written about elsewhere.

Those keys had become part of me. Almost as much as the radio, or the suit, or saying "Have a wonderful stay."

Eventually I turned them in. That might have been the hardest part. Because keys aren't just metal. They're trust. Responsibility. Twenty-one years of knowing every hallway, every shortcut, every service elevator, every hidden corner of a building that had become a second home.

Out the Door

I walked out of the Westin for the last time with my new Zillow backpack over one shoulder — a notebook and a laptop where a radio and a luggage cart used to be. No suit. No brass luggage tags. No heavy ring of keys.

Just the beginning of another adventure, and, for once, a little bit rested for it.

Every once in a while I still listen to those old voicemails. Not because they remind me of shifts I missed. They remind me that sometimes the hardest part of moving forward is saying goodbye to a place that helped make you who you are — and that letting yourself rest before the next chapter isn't a betrayal of the last one. It's how you actually get to keep it.

As of today — July 10, 2026 — I'm still at Zillow, on my new team, in this new chapter. It hasn't been without its own share of turns since. But that's a different story for a different day.