I was a first year desk clerk at a Ramada Inn in Van Horn, TX. It was during the summer, the busiest season in Van Horn, and I was working the desk all alone. A young couple drove up in a car all painted up with "Just Married". The man asked if I had a room as far from the lobby & restaurant as possible. The Ramada Inn was a large property and I had the perfect room in an isolated building at the farthest point from the lobby. Now this was before computers, and desk clerks had to hand-write folios on each guest registration. The folios had what we referred to as guts, which really were 2 slips of paper with the guests' name and room number. One slip was put in the telephone rack in alpabetical order so that if the guest received a phone call, the clerk could find the guest and his/her room number to connect the call. The second slip went into the room rack so that the clerk would know that the room was rented and who it was rented to. Then the folio was filed in the bucket for future posting of charges. About an hour after I rented the room to the newly-weds, an 18-wheel truck drove up. A huge, a very rough-looking truck driver came up to the desk and asked for a quiet room. I quickly picked out a room, gave him his key and sent him on his way. As he was driving back to his room, I began filling out his folio. I pulled the guts out, filed one in the telephone rack and the other in the room rack. Then as I went to file his folio in the bucket, my heart started beating 100 miles per hour. I had failed to pull the guts out of the newly-weds' folio and had rented their room to this truck driver. Although I was alone at the desk, I knew I had to try and intercept the truck driver before he entered the newly weds' room, so I quickly locked the cash drawer, and darted out the door, running as fast as I could for a room that was located as far away from the lobby as possible. As I turned the corner of the wing where the room was located, I saw the truck driver pulling the room key from his pocket. And just as he was about to insert the key into the lock, I gasped for air, and yelled, "STOP!" Luckily, for us all, he heard me, I explained what I had done, we both had a good laugh, and we jumped into his truck and he drove us both back to the lobby where I rented him another room. The newly-weds never knew what almost happened.