by Jacob Tomsky
Service is not about being up-front and honest. Service is about minimizing negatives and creating the illusion of perfection. Here’s how it’s done: Lie. Smile. Finesse. Barter. Convince. Lie again. Smile again.
I learned mind control, how to persuade guests they want something other than what they booked. You demand a king bed? But are you sure you don’t want double beds (BARTER)? I only offer because double-bed rooms are larger, more square footage (LIE), and you can use the second bed to spread out your clothes (FINESSE) or use it to relax on and still have a fresh bed to crawl into (CONVINCE). I’m glad I have a double-bed room for you too, sir (SMILE). It was absolutely my pleasure (LIE AGAIN). Enjoy your stay (SMILE AGAIN). The guest leaves happy, and that makes me happy.
I came to learn the system by heart, how to utilize every single feature. Within a PMS, perhaps the trickiest yet most helpful representation of the hotel is the matrix or tape chart. Basically, every room is listed vertically on the left with a horizontal row extended out representing that room on future dates. A currently checked-in reservation for a specific room is usually represented as a long red bar, which, let’s say, takes up three nights, then after that a hole for two nights, and then an upcoming res pre-blocked in that same room, usually represented as a green bar: and that lets me see the hotel as a whole, allowing me to drag reservations from this room to that, filling in holes so as not to leave one-night vacancies I cannot fill unless I have a one-night guest. In those first months I was actually naive enough to ask guests if they would like to stay in one room for tonight and move to another tomorrow for the rest of their stay. They sure as hell would not.
I also learned how to fully operate the phone system, which was simple. Days assigned to the PBX station were days of spinning around in the chairs, wearing a headset, talking idly to co-workers, balling up printer paper and throwing it at the mailbox slots, throwing it at each other. The calls come down the line in order, one agent after the next, so, should there be four agents working, after you take your call—which could be as simple as “What time is checkout?”—the next three calls were up to your colleagues, and it might not come back to you for a good ten minutes, depending on the time of day and occupancy. I once used a stopwatch to time my workload, starting the counter when I picked up a call and stopping it the moment I disconnected. Then I would go back to throwing paper and spinning around in the chair. After timing the entire day, I calculated my hourly wage based on actual time worked, and it came to over $200 an hour, which, taking the math further, would have given me over $400,000 a year.
Interestingly, though, operators were also in charge of the in-room movie systems, which were separate back then, so removing charges and canceling orders had to be done at a separate console.
“Good afternoon, thank you for calling the front office. This is Tommy, how may I assist you?” How many times has that phrase chunk come out of my mouth? If you wedged open my skull and pressed the point of a souvenir hotel pen into the right spot in my brain, I guarantee that phone greeting will spurt out of my mouth on auto-repeat.
“Yeah, I’m in room 1205. I accidentally ordered a movie. Can you take it off the bill?”
“Certainly, sir.”
Over to the movie console to cancel Asian Secretaries Rike It Rough, two minutes and seven seconds into playback. I guess the opening credits were sufficient.
Worry not. The systems have changed, and we can no longer see the movie titles. I mean, we know the new releases cost $12.95 and the sexual releases cost $14.95. We just no longer have access to your specific fetishes. Not that we judge you (LIE).
These were my first glimpses into the lives of strangers, something I was coming to realize was a side effect of this business (or perk, depending on the predominance of your voyeuristic tendencies). Want to know what people are really like? What their strange habits are? How they treat people when no one they deem important is watching? Ask their desk agent. Basically, ask their servants: because that is what we are, an army of servants, included with the price of the room.
I was having a lovely time, though, learning to navigate life through the eyes of someone who serves but is unseen. César Ritz, the “king of hoteliers and hotelier to kings” and founder of what would become the Ritz-Carlton empire, is quoted as saying, “People like to be served, but invisibly.” If a guest wanted to be gruff and shout out orders, I was accommodating, all stiff movements and sharp, quick head nods, handling his business efficiently. If a guest wanted to assume we were friends, call me by my first name, and tell me about a street performer he saw last night on Bourbon Street, I would lean on the desk, chin in hand, and listen, laughing at the same exact description I heard yesterday from another guest, about the same exact street performer.
I was infinite. All things to all people. Uniform impeccable. Providing exceptional service. Working overtime.
I learned how to defuse anger.
I learned how to take all the blame and smile.
We worked hard through the mild New Orleans winter, through the seasonal drop in occupancy, which allowed me to focus on each guest interaction and master the system. As spring took hold, the heady fragrance of flowers almost overcoming the debaucherous odor of the Quarter, we steadied ourselves for our first run through New Orleans’s premier tourist event: Mardi Gras.
Nothing is more universally misunderstood than Mardi Gras. The image associated with the event usually boils down to … well, tits. Tits and beads. But that’s like saying the island of Manhattan boils down to popped-collar trust-fund date rapists, just because you’ve only been to the Upper East Side. Or the whole city is Chinese, just because you got off at the Canal Street N train stop. Breasts, without a doubt, are available for viewing, but only in a very small strip of the French Quarter, on a single street. The rest of the city couldn’t be more lovely this time of year. It’s a time for families (and everyone is family), parades, and getting together as a city to celebrate life and, most important, take time off work. And, yeah, also, drink.
“Care to join us for a libation, Tommy?” This polite request came from Gordon the bellman, a true southern gentleman, over six feet tall, gaunt, flamboyantly gay, and exceedingly kindhearted.
“I don’t drink.”
“I need me a drink. I can’t stand this job.” That admission came from Mark, another bellman: black, very young, and constantly unhappy with his position. The money wasn’t enough for him: dragging people’s bags around made him feel subordinate, I suppose. Most people would put up with a lot more for the kind of cash a bellman can earn, but Mark was openly humiliated by his duties. (“What a gorgeous job for a guy … Carrying people’s suitcases and waiting around for a tip.” —Holden Caulfield.)
We snapped off our name tags, changed out of our uniforms, and exited through the employee entrance, right into the French Quarter. Since Mardi Gras weekend was approaching, everyone’s neck was roped with beads, from the McDonald’s fry cooks to the janitors to the homeless. Another rarely mentioned effect of the beads: they brought us all together. We drained the seriousness out of our individuality by wearing cheap, gaudy plastic beads.
Five bellmen, Sanford the doorman, and three other FDAs rolled into the Alibi bar, a service industry spot on the west edge of the Quarter.
Drinks: dirt cheap.
Clientele: often wearing name tags and/or aprons (waiters on break from fine dining restaurants in the area rolled in to shove dollars into the video poker, smoke cigarettes, take tequila shots, and generally make the most of their fifteen-minute breaks).
“What you drankin’, Tommy?” Sanford asked.
“Just a soda or something. I don’t drink.”
“You never drank? Ever?”
“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink,” Gordon drawled out. “When they get up in the morning, that’s the best they will feel all day. Frank Sinatra.”
“I did when I was younger. In high school.”
“Word? What’d you drink then?”
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“Whiskey.”
“Jack?”
“Jack.”
“There it is. Lisa, angel, four Heinekens, five Abita Ambers, and a shot of Jack for my boy here. This dude is on the up-and-up.”
There it was before me. I had only one option. A lifting of the glasses and then down it went, hot and nice.
“Nah, nah. I know I didn’t just see that shit. Tommy, you had you a shot right there? That was Dr Pepper?” Perry asked, striding in from the street, sitting down on a stool next to me. He didn’t even have to look at the bartender: she opened two Heinekens and put them both before him immediately.
“Whoa.” My breath was still choked with burn. “Yep.”
“Yeah, then you drinking one with me too.” And with that another was served up, and I took that one down out of respect for Perry.
It was almost Mardi Gras, fuck it.
Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.
The next morning, after my immaculate liver processed the whiskey like water, I awoke refreshed and ready to work through Mardi Gras at the hotel. There were plenty of call-outs, plenty of extra shifts available; front desk agents with less pristine livers were left bedridden, or they deliberately called in sick to catch their favorite parades. Or ride in them—even Perry called out to hold his position in the Zulu Parade, promising to hand me down a coveted painted coconut if I could find him on the float, which I failed to do, since I was working doubles to make sure our desk was adequately staffed.
I worked on and on at that front desk. I turned down tips to prove my level of commitment. Turned down tips? I know, a minute ago I was bitching about the wooden tumor. Now, if I escorted a guest to the elevators, taking the time to personally walk him or her across the lobby, and was presented with a five-dollar bill for my service, I would bow and say, “Please. It’s my pleasure,” and walk off, leaving the guest with tip in hand and mouth hanging open. That guest will be a loyal customer for life. How does that help me? Well … it doesn’t. However, I was simply and happily following the company mandate, which demands that I escort. The policy at my hotel was that employees should never point or give directions; they should walk guests to their destination. Hotels are not the only business that secretly implement this policy. Ask any salesperson in Nordstrom where the ladies’ shoe department is. You will take him or her, like a dog, on a walk.
But it wasn’t all great shifts and great service. It’s a hotel, after all: I was learning quickly that shit goes horribly wrong.
I certainly recall the first guest I ever walked. The term “walking a guest” sends shivers down any GM’s spine, and multiple front desk agent spines as well. Often (okay, always) hotels will overbook whenever possible. The average no-show rate (guests who cancel last minute or simply fail to arrive) is 10 percent, daily. Accordingly, the sales department and reservations are encouraged to book the property to 110 percent capacity, in the hopes that with cancellations and no-shows they will fill every room in the hotel. Putting a head in every bed is called a “perfect sell,” and it’s not easy to accomplish. After clocking out at 11:00 p.m. and leaving the hotel with only five rooms vacant but ten remaining arrivals, you come in the next morning and ask, “What happened?”
“Perfect sell.”
“No shit!?”
But what happens when the numbers game doesn’t play in the hotel’s favor? Someone gets walked.
Now, a man in my current financial position, a man clocking in and out for a living, would consider getting walked to be a wonderful surprise. Sure, I planned to stay at Hotel A, but Hotel A blew it and overbooked. Management saw the ship sinking around 5:00 p.m. and started calling other comparable hotels in the area, securing rooms under the name Hotel A TBD. So, yeah, Hotel A made a mess, but they will pay for my entire night’s room and tax (plus one phone call—how cute is that?) and certainly arrange or pay for transportation, even if it’s just down the block.
I was once in Boston, during marathon weekend, and when I arrived at my hotel and announced my name at the desk, the agent froze, terrified. She stammered, “Oh, Mr. Jacobs. Oh. Please. Please, just wait here a moment.” A manager (easy to spot; different suit, different tie, surname on the name tag) came out from the back office sporting one hell of a frown, holding a folded piece of paper in his hands as if it were my grandmother’s death certificate. I knew what it was: the letter I was going to hand to the front desk. The front desk of Hotel B, where I was headed.
“Are you guys walking me?” I asked enthusiastically. That reaction really threw them. They must have thought I was psychotic.
“Oh, well … yes.”
“Relax. I work the front desk. It’s all good.” Their faces instantly drained of all that fear and trepidation. Plus they gave me twenty for cab fare. And I walked. I saved $350 on the room rate, and that twenty bought drinks in the lobby bar of Hotel B. Well, it bought a drink in Hotel B; the cocktail prices were absurd. Hotel B is ridiculously overpriced.
However, that is a man in my financial situation. Why was all that fear and trepidation in their Bostonian front desk eyes?
Because motherfuckers go ape shit when you walk them. They are incredulous. They cry. Honestly, never in their lives has anything like this ever happened to them, ever. Meanwhile, they are one of ten walks for me tonight, and tomorrow is looking like another night “front row at the shit show.”
“I will never stay here again, ever.”
These people just saved five hundred dollars, and they are irate.
(That word was invented for the hospitality business: “irate.”)
I
t was a Japanese couple who broke my walk cherry. And there wasn’t much foreplay or romance.
“Mr. Umagawa, I am terribly sorry about putting you in this position. But we have secured alternate lodging for you at the Ritz-Carlton. It is four blocks away, and we will be taking care of the full cost of your room.”
“No. No. NO. We have contract. You must honor contract.”
At this point his wife started yelling at me, loudly. Andy was working the desk beside me, watching it all go down. Soon after, this incident became a famous anecdote, one he’d be asked to re-create in the employee cafeteria.
“So she starts screaming, right? Half Japanese, half English until she boils it down to the phrase ‘We sleep on floor! We SLEEP RIGHT HERE ON FLOOR. WE SLEEP ON FLOOR.’ At which point the husband, who is doing deep-breathing exercises, draws his hand slowly in front of his wife, silencing her immediately with this tiny little gesture. He started to talk about the con track again, you know, honoring the con track. Your boy Tommy here just kept his head swiveling from one to the other, ‘CONTRACK.’ ‘WE SWEEP RYE HEE ON FROOR.’ ‘YOU HONOR CONTRACK!’ ‘WE SWEEP ON FROOR!’ ”
When Trish finally came out and saw the miserable scene in the lobby, she quieted them down and gave them a room. At Hotel A, our hotel.
Yep. You might have used this argument yourself, because I’ve heard it an infinite number of times: “Come on, you’re telling me there isn’t one single empty room in this hotel? It’s not even 5:00 p.m., and you are seriously telling me there is not one single goddamn room in this goddamn hotel? Do not bullshit me … Tommy.”
Notice the use of the name there at the end, the way he paused and fished it off my name tag? A real jerk move. As I said, we get to see how people treat their servants, and it’s rarely attractive. But he is right. I have twenty-five vacant rooms at my disposal. Why is Asshole A getting walked to Hotel B? Many reasons:
1. He booked Expedia, hence he has a deeply discounted rate, hence he is less important.
