The Five Minutes Before She Knocks on the Door

Most advice about outcall bookings concerns the message. This is about the five minutes at the other end, after everything is arranged and before anybody knocks, which almost nobody plans and which has a surprisingly large effect on how the first part of an evening goes.

Deal with the room

Not a deep clean. A tidy that would take a hotel housekeeper ninety seconds. Move the suitcase off the floor and put it against a wall. Clear one surface completely. Put anything from earlier in the evening, glasses and wrappers and the remains of something from a bag, out of sight or out of the room.

Then the temperature, which in this city swings between stifling and freezing depending entirely on what the radiator has decided to do that week. Set it somewhere reasonable and open a window for a minute if the air has gone stale. A room that has been aired reads differently from a room that has not, and neither of you will be able to say why.

Deal with the light

Overhead lighting in hotel rooms is uniformly unkind. If the room has a lamp, use the lamp and turn the ceiling light off. If it only has the ceiling light, turn it down if it dims and leave the bathroom light on with the door ajar if it does not.

This takes ten seconds and it is the single cheapest improvement available to anybody. The television should be off rather than muted, because a muted screen still moves and a moving screen still pulls the eye.

Deal with yourself

Shower before rather than after. That sounds obvious and is skipped constantly, usually by guests who have been out all evening and are working to a window they misjudged. Be ready at the start of the forty minutes, not the end, because the session clock runs from the booked time rather than from when you are available.

Brush your teeth. Put on something you would answer a door in. If you have been drinking, drink a glass of water and eat something, because the conversation she opens with is one you need to be able to follow and hold to.

Put out the small things

Two clean towels somewhere obvious. Water within reach of wherever people will sit. The money counted and set aside, if a balance is due at the door, so that it is handed over in one movement rather than assembled from three pockets.

That last one is worth more than it sounds. Money handled quickly at the start disappears from the evening. Money fumbled at the start stays in the room for the next hour.

Put the phone down

Face up and reachable until she knocks, because she may need to call from the street. Face down and silent from the moment she is inside. Notifications during an hour that somebody travelled across a city for are the clearest possible statement about where that hour sits on a list.

And then do nothing

This is the part guests skip. Sit down for the last two minutes. Do not spend them rehearsing an opening line, because there is no line to rehearse and a rehearsed one always sounds it.

The first minute or two of a visit is a straightforward conversation between two adults. She will say where her limits sit, in her own words, and the only thing required of you is to listen to it and take it at face value. A guest who arrives at that conversation calm, in a room that has been made ready, hears it properly. A guest who is still moving a suitcase and looking for a towel hears about half of it, and the half he missed is usually the half that mattered.

Five minutes. It is the cheapest improvement to an evening available anywhere on this site, and unlike most advice it costs nothing at all.

A short note for anybody in an apartment rather than a hotel. The same five minutes apply, and one extra item joins them: check that the buzzer works and that you can hear it from the room you will be sitting in. Buzzers in converted buildings here fail quietly and often, and a guest who has never tested his own has no way of knowing which kind he has. If it does not work, put that in the thread and arrange to come down instead.