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 third chapter.

When I got to work the afternoon following the 1989 Loma Prienta earthquake, I came upon an exodus of guests leaving. I couldn’t tell if they had been traumatized by the experience, or just annoyed that there was still no power. Either way, by sundown there were only five rooms occupied out of the 110 in total. Lucky for me, most of the guests had left in the morning and I worked in the evening, so I was spared from having to carry luggage down nine flights of stairs, as the elevators still didn’t have power.

That duty was left to the assistant general manager and the morning bellman. As dusk turned to night, we still had no power, so the remaining guests mostly had to stay in the candlelit lobby since their rooms also didn’t have lights. I had very little to do that night. I went to the roof of the hotel and saw a skyline completely blacked out, save for the red emergency lights blinking on top of the skyscrapers downtown.

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Some of the remaining guests were a group of Russian folk musicians who were touring the county, and just happened to be in San Francisco the day of the earthquake. They were one of the first cultural exchange programs between the United States and what was still the Soviet Union. That was the era of Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost, the Soviet government policy of more openness and transparency, and San Francisco was the first city on their tour. Ironically the earthquake occurred after their first night, so they gave only one performance.

I couldn’t help but think of the great Italian opera singer, Enrico Caruso. Legend has it that the morning after he gave a performance of Carmen, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake struck. Apparently he took it as a bad omen and never returned to San Francisco again, which is odd since he was born in Naples, Italy, a city with its own history of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In that region of Italy, the locals call it Terra Moto, which loosely translates to earth-in-motion.

Since the Russian folk musicians’ performance was canceled and they were stuck in San Francisco until their next gig, they set up their instruments and serenaded the other remaining guests with traditional Russian folk music in the lobby. The general manager also bought Chinese food for the staff and remaining guests. There we were, about a dozen people, guests and staff alike. We sat in the candlelit lobby, eating Chinese food, listening to live traditional Russian folk music, and getting to know one another. For us, it was a magical night to remember following a tragic day.

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