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 from the second chapter.

My new bell captain, Vinny, couldn’t have been more different from John Francis at the Vacation Suites. Vinny was born and raised in San Francisco, but he had a golly-jeepers/gee-whiz kind of demeanor. He was always pleasantly unflappable, nothing seemed to faze him, and he’d help me out when I needed it. But mostly he would just put the schedule together, which was not very hard as there were only three bellmen.

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Most of the other employees had been employed there for many years and I worked quite effortlessly with most of them. Somehow I started off doing nights with Felix, an extremely closeted gay man from the Philippines. So repressed was he that he would nervously laugh at everything – and I mean everything!

It got to the point where I would inform him of something mundane, like I had just finished moving a guest to another room, and he would break out in a nervous laugh that would come in staccato segments. Most people would laugh like ha-ha-ha. His nervous laugh was more like the eh-eh-eh of machine gun chatter.

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