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.

Two of the many hotels I have worked in

The work was mostly routine, but every now and then something unforeseen occurred which snapped one into action. One autumn evening, the Union Square district of San Francisco suffered a brownout, not a blackout. I later learned that a brownout is like a blackout except that the electricity only goes out for a few seconds, instead of for a long period of time. If it were a true blackout, we would have followed the emergency protocols, but since this was a brownout, the electricity only went out for a few moments – barely noticeable if you weren’t paying attention.

Because this happened in the middle of the night, guests didn’t know about it until they left their rooms to get some ice, only to find that their electronic keys stopped working and they couldn’t get back in. At that point they had to come down to the lobby in their bathrobes to get their keys reprogrammed. Also, a number of guests who were checking out that day came down to pay their bill at the front desk, before returning to the room to collect their luggage. Unbeknownst to them, the electronic locks to their rooms were decoded because of the brownout, so the key the guest left with five minutes earlier could not open the door upon their return.

The result of all this were two dozen angry guests in their bathrobes, or dressed in their overcoats ready to leave, panicking at the front desk. Of course this was in the middle of the night when there were no engineers on duty, and the only real authority on the property was the burnt-out night auditor. Lucky for us we had Cecil, an African-American Vietnam War veteran, whom I always suspected was far too overqualified for the job but seemed to crave the solitude.

After he ascertained the problem, and discovering we had guests who had to catch flights but couldn’t get into their rooms, he made the executive decision to simply kick in the doors, as there was simply not enough time to reprogram each lock. As much of a nail-biting experience as it was for the guests, it was fun for me – the night houseman and Aldridge (our intrepid constable) spent kicking in doors, Miami Vice–style. In fact we made it a game, pretending we were cops. Aldridge really did think he was a cop kicking in doors, and got into it a little too much.

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