Saturday's Passage of the Week

In my upcoming book, Service IS The Business (working title) I share a behind-the-desk perspective of what it is like to work at a real San Francisco hotel concierge desk. Enjoy this brief segment.

One night a guest checked in late. When he saw the name on her driver’s license, Patty Pancake, he couldn’t stop laughing. All through the check-in process he laughed, which really annoyed her. The more he apologized, the more he would laugh.

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No one else laughed when we heard her name, but if she called down to the front desk and Tommy answered the phone, before she could finish saying, “This is Patty Pancake in room…,” he would burst out laughing.

As the story goes, the boss called Tommy into his office and gruffly said, “We have a guest named Patty Pancake who says you start laughing at her name every time it’s mentioned. Is this true?”

With that, Tommy burst out into uncontrollable laughter, angering the general manager even more. To this day, more than three decades later, when I remind Tommy of that guest, he still laughs at the name Patty Pancake.

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