The dawn of the one year anniversary at the hotel is approaching, and I can't help but puff myself with a little pride that I've made it this far. I guess you could call employment in the hospitality industry a sort of right of passage into adulthood. I've finally realized that being an adult is checking your identity at the door, and massaging your swollen ankles five times a week after being shackled to a desk. Being a successful adult must mean your acceptance of corporate slavery, and of course being forced to daunt pantyhose and maybe a name tag forty hours a week.
It's been a while since I've updated my blog and, I reassure you, I have a good excuse. We'll start at the beginning.
Around the first week of the calendar year, I was pulled into my manager's office for a discussion about my desktop wallpaper. Apparently one of the suits from upstairs had found her way behind the front desk to use my computer. I had been at lunch and luckily missed the awkward encounter. My manager herself had a tone of indifference, but mentioned that this woman was deeply offended by the art of genius Brian Viveros, and that I was to replace it with something "appropriate." What surprised me was that I had specifically chosen one of the artists' more conservative paintings. Of course I didn't bother to argue, but I did interject a spout of sarcasm and my manager laughed with me.
"Should I resort to a bowl of fruit? Or maybe the picture of a beautiful spring sunset from the South of France?"
"Just lay low for a few days," she said. "Some people just don't understand your taste in art."
I really did put a 17th century painting of fruit on my desktop for a few days, and the blatant stuffiness of the painting made my boss laugh for days. Gradually I've been replacing the desktop with various art from contemporary artists, whose darkness and sexual innuendo are a bit more subdued. I'm still attached enough to my rebellious nature that I'll also sport two earrings in each ear, paint only one of my neutral fingernails bright blue, and sport six pieces of unconventional jewelry. The goal is to see how much of my individuality I can display before I'm whipped back into a brick-in-a-wall existence.
Nobody's mentioned a word, though I do get the occasional raised eyebrow from the more Judeo-Christian members of the front desk staff.
So this was a few months ago, but starting after that epic music festival, the management staff has been particularly focused on the hotel's survey scores. The meetings and occasional slaps on the wrist have been incredibly hard on front desk morale. Our survey scores never seem grow past a D+ (I think the highest I've seen this year is a collective score of 68% satisfaction). It's discouraging to witness the hard work, long hours, and exhaustion of your colleagues and have nothing tangible to show for it.
With the growing pressure from upper-upper management, the front desk has scrambled for new ideas on how to improve the surveys. My suspicions about the low scores start with one of the newer questions on the survey, which is a 1-10 scale of how the staff "genuinely cared." That question consistently bruises our score, with ratings of 1 and 2. I don't think I've been served by anybody in the service industry who I believe genuinely cared about me. Even if the service was exquisite and to my highest satisfaction, I would never assume that the employee genuinely cared about a total stranger. Maybe my standards are lower than our experienced business travelers, but if I'm being served by somebody friendly, attentive, and professional, I'm satisfied. I believe that 80% of the front desk staff is all three of these things, and yet we're written off as blase and even cruel. I think in order to achieve even a B+ in the "genuinely cared" category, we'd have to speak in a frighteningly shriek upward inflection, agree to the most impossible and obscene requests (helicopter pads, pet giraffe storage), and offer complimentary sexual services at check-in.
I think receiving even a passing grade in this area would require fellatio and anilingus.
As upstairs management has proven itself to be rather conservative, they have not yet resorted to soliciting prostitution. They started an incentive program in which the team with the most improvement on its survey scores would be rewarded a gift card to a strip-mall restaurant or business. Chili's. Chik-Fil-A. Home Depot. Wal-Mart. They're really trying to inspire us, you see.
The front desk, however, is being subject to the worst kind of torture. Management has decided to completely confiscate our Internet usage, aside from work-related websites. Now, you may agree that a company as beige and uniform as mine would have banned Internet browsing from the beginning. And that it wasn't an unreasonable request to prevent employees from wasting company time. And that Internet usage detracted attention from the guests. All of these things are true, especially during peak hours and when our guest turnaround is so massive and time consuming that most of us will wait three hours before using the restroom and our eyes will start to develop a lemon-colored tint.
There are, however, times during a shift when the lobby is pretty quiet. In the early morning and late evening, the tumbleweeds start dancing lazily and the elevator music actually becomes audible. Before the Internet ban, most of us would read the news or a book from Nook for PC. Yesterday, I started reading Naked Lunch after not having encountered a guest for almost thirty minutes. My newly promoted supervisor immediately pointed her chubby finger at me. I bet her Catholic parents taught her that kind of condescending behavior.
If she ever pisses me off enough, I can always blackmail her with some valuable information she volunteered to me. I wonder how HR would react if they knew about her sexual relationship with another supervisor, prior to her promotion. I think that would put a damper on her squeaky clean religious persona. Why do people tell me these things? Don't they know if they make themselves my enemy, that I'll manipulate them into submission?
An interesting sociology project would to examine the effects of subjecting people to such maddening boredom. Already I'm starting to feel suffocated by the blanket of hotel-induced insanity, for real this time. I started a conversation with one of my supervisors about amputee pornography. I provoked a violent debate about pro-choice/pro-life with one of the concierge lounge employees, and ending up calling her a traitor to women. Yesterday, I got drunk by myself during Happy Hour at the Mexican restaurant I'm always referring guests to. Five shots of tequila and a plate of gourmet appetizers later, I feel asleep at home around 7:00pm and didn't wake up until a little after 8:30am.
To reassure you that I was joking about the C-4, here's the Rihanna song I've had stuck in the head the last few days:
