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.

I was lucky enough to know some of people who had worked at the Franklyn and who then moved on to other hotels. These guys would call me if they knew one of their colleagues would be off for a while due to vacation or illness. So in between those elusive film gigs, I supplemented my income by being the on-call guy for a variety of hotels.

Word spread that I was reliable and would often fill in at a moment’s notice. I found myself shuttling between half a dozen hotels when I wasn’t working on a film or commercial.

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It was on one of the on-call hotel gigs that I learned a valuable lesson that helped inform me on how to be a concierge. A hotel I worked on-call at had rooms right above the cable cars on Powell Street. I filled in for one of their bellmen and basically brought guests to their room, explaining the amenities of the hotel, and answered any questions.

l liked this hotel because many of the rooms were right above the cable cars. I would check guests in and they would hear those unmistakable sounds. At first they were excited to hear the rumble of the cable cars, the ding-ding of the bells, and the grinding of the cable running under the street.

Who could blame them? Cable cars, and their sounds, are synonymous with San Francisco, as you can’t really hear them anywhere else.

But after a day they were less enthusiastic. Two different lines ran by this hotel, from 6:00 am to midnight. That is 18 hours of continuous rumbling, grinding, and bell-ringing that never stopped. I would say they stayed maybe a night before they asked to switch rooms. In fact the front desk often had half a dozen stand-by rooms available for just such an occasion.

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