My little sister sent me a message recently saying that she hasn't seen or heard from me in months and asking if I was okay.
It was one of the most beautiful messages I have ever received. It is sad, but I'll admit to preferring the sound of "Where have you been?" to "Why are you still here?" In the days of constant internet access and instant feedback it has become abnormal for people to simply fall off the face of the Earth.
Falling off the face of the Earth, mind you, is my specialty.
So what have I been doing? Writing, writing nonstop except to work, eat, sleep, shower, and read. In fact I've taken on a third job as a front desk agent in the hotel which my bar is located, it is about this that I figure it's time I shared some thoughts.
So let me tell you a few things.
My first weekend as a front desk agent was a swift kick in the groin. To me, customer service is not some complicated ritual that only some people can do, but a learned skill that is basic human nature, until you actually get down and dirty with the problem clients, like the person who felt the need to spell out a four letter word while slamming their hand on the table because it was pronounced by another person in a different accent, or the client who gets exactly what they want but screams and yells because they didn't get it exactly the way they wanted.
Yes, that is customer service.
When a person goes on vacation, or to a McDonalds for that matter, they suddenly forget that other people exist. This is in effect the real reason people find they cannot provide excellent customer service, or even handle these kinds of jobs at all. Too many people simply want the product without taking an honest look at the work it takes to get that product, and in a hotel- the chances of an employee to receive such a customer go up by an alarming rate. The reason, I suppose, is due to fatigue. Most complaining customers later explain that they are tired, or came from a great distance. They suddenly become not customers of various enterprises but victims of companies that view them not as people but as consumers.
See what I did there? I just flipped the whole thing over on its head- the consumers are treated like bags of money and the employees are treated like bags of products. It's a nice cycle that everyone cries victim of. I've known this ever since that scar in my resume called two-ish years of Wal-Mart. And I try my best to think of that every time I get a new customer through my doors.
But why should working at a front desk be any different? Well, it's not- in fact it's pretty easy on the surface, you stand there, look happy try not to die inside (die inside anyway) and provide the service you are hired to provide. But when you go deep enough and actually attempt it, you'll find that a front desk agent not only has to memorize a ridiculous series of unrelated but completely intertwining rules, regulations, and procedures that ultimately are completely useless except in the most extreme circumstances where their absence or mishandling ends in a really bad law-suit. Never in my life have I frozen up and made mistakes that could have cost me the job more than my first few weeks at the front desk because of exactly these procedures.
What do you mean, you ask?
Say I put a customer that has booked through third party in to my system. Their account requires me to take down their credit card information because the card on file isn't real. But I put it through anyway because I'm lazy, now the hotel is out a couple hundred dollars (This is impossible with my system, but gives you an idea).
Or say a customer brings pets to the hotel, so we have them fill out a pet registration form, but the pets are service animals, so now we just violated policy by asking them to fill out a form, they sue the company for breaking the law.
All of this boils down to the quick five minute conversation between the desk agent trying desperately to be left alone and the customer trying desperately to not get ripped off while being left alone from the annoying fake small talk the representative is required to regurgitate. If that five minutes goes bad, money is lost by often hundreds of dollars.
So no pressure or anything.
When all that is down and there is no longer any way the front desk agent could get those interactions wrong, suddenly they can be thrown into a situation so absurd that they have to use a novel technology that most humans don't have access to- problem solving skills.
Instant and immediate problem solving is accomplished in several different ways:
There's the yes man:
Customer- Hey I'd like my room for half the regular rate, and I want to check out four hours late since you said you're sold out tomorrow, can you do that?
Yes man- Sure thing!
The Idunno:
Customer- how do I get to my room?
Idunno- Idunno.
The helpful but useless:
Customer- Can you explain to me exactly how it is that we can look at rocks and tell how old they are?
The helpful but useless- Oh jeese let me ask my manager, Bob, BOB, can you- oh he's at a meeting with the hotel owner right now can you just wait there, oh wait no I'm sorry he went home for the day, Hah! where's my head at. Sorry I can't help you, feel free to ask my boss when he gets in next time around the time he's scheduled.
All of these techniques provide excellent strategies for getting the customer as far away as possible as soon as possible with only a minimal amount of loud vituperation.
Of course I'm kidding, but you'd be surprised how not cut-and- dry this job really is. It is a job so easy that it's not, so hard that it's not and yet still has you going home exhausted and crying.
In all it has helped me improve my writing, especially dialogue, as I have personally found it easier to write the awkward conversational scenes in my as yet unfinished novel Adebayo's End.
HOLD ON ALEXANDER, you scream, YOU SAID IT WOULD BE DONE BY LIKE FOREVER AGO!
Yeah... yeah I did. But when I got to forever ago I found that I had at least twenty thousand more words to go, and that was twenty-four thousand words ago...
The book has become roughly five hundred some odd pages over the past month in its first draft, which I expect to cut down in half during editing- and with work and a summer course coming up I'm going to be slightly distracted, especially when it comes to responding to messages and phone calls.
If it is any consolation- I can see the ending and it's really a matter of just filling those spaces, and I must say that is a liberating place to be. I expect to publish before 2019, so I'm still on schedule, just behind by a few months.
Until next time, I hope you're all well.
Love,
-Alexander
