Tweet
The recent proliferation of threads from me is proof enough that I'm back in customer service, back in the hospitality industry, after about seven years away from both.
I'm not having an easy time of it.
I work four nights a week at a hotel doing the night audit, and I wanted night audit specifically because I had hoped to have time to study once I got the routines down. However, I trained with the "audit goddess" last night, and she informed me that I should expect perhaps half an hour of downtime a night -- if I'm lucky. She doesn't think night audit is a good job for a college student, and thinks perhaps I should look for something else. On the one hand I can agree with her because the instructions for the night audit run to fifteen pages, and none of it is the least bit user-friendly or intuitive. It's like memorizing all the capitals of Africa: you just have to do it by rote memorization because A + B never, ever equals C in this particular hotel chain's night audit equation.
So there's that. I'm very frustrated, and on the verge of freaking out. Right now, things are okay because I only have one class left during this summer term. In the fall, though, I'll have four classes. As things stand now, I have no idea how I'll do it, especially if the audit keeps being the slog that it is.
Then there's another thing: I hate the customers. Every hostility that sprouted and grew during my last stint in the hospitality industry is still there, big and bold and brassy. I have to repress my contempt every time a guest approaches the front desk, and the audit goddess told me yesterday that the management watches the cameras to make sure you're being subservient enough -- which is to say, they want you to latch on to every passing guest like a viral infection and ingratiate yourself. I don't see myself doing that for several reasons -- among them the fact that I don't care how you are and I don't care what brings you to town. Like my city itself, tourist resort that it is, I have a love/hate relationship with the tourists. Like the city, I want your money, but I couldn't care less if you flip the car on your way back home.
This kind of attitude is what you get after several years catering to, usually, fictional problems made up by hotel guests who are looking to make someone as miserable as they are, and who have succeeded marvelously with me.
And don't even get me started on the goddamn breakfast. I have go prepare about twenty different items for consumption by upwards of 250 people -- while running back and forth to the front desk to attend to calls and guests - and not get a drop of it on my clothes, because management thinks the night auditors don't have enough to do. It was their decision that the auditors do it all, so that the breakfast attendant doesn't have anything to do but maintain it and refill as necessary. So there I am, scrambling eggs and gagging from the smell of it, in a suit and tie, and going home with egg stench clinging to me.
So all in all, this job is not off to a good start. If the audit goddess is to be believed, this trend will continue.
What do I do? I'm already as "hateful as a nurse" (so one of my partners medical coworkers pronounced me) from this.
I'm not having an easy time of it.
I work four nights a week at a hotel doing the night audit, and I wanted night audit specifically because I had hoped to have time to study once I got the routines down. However, I trained with the "audit goddess" last night, and she informed me that I should expect perhaps half an hour of downtime a night -- if I'm lucky. She doesn't think night audit is a good job for a college student, and thinks perhaps I should look for something else. On the one hand I can agree with her because the instructions for the night audit run to fifteen pages, and none of it is the least bit user-friendly or intuitive. It's like memorizing all the capitals of Africa: you just have to do it by rote memorization because A + B never, ever equals C in this particular hotel chain's night audit equation.
So there's that. I'm very frustrated, and on the verge of freaking out. Right now, things are okay because I only have one class left during this summer term. In the fall, though, I'll have four classes. As things stand now, I have no idea how I'll do it, especially if the audit keeps being the slog that it is.
Then there's another thing: I hate the customers. Every hostility that sprouted and grew during my last stint in the hospitality industry is still there, big and bold and brassy. I have to repress my contempt every time a guest approaches the front desk, and the audit goddess told me yesterday that the management watches the cameras to make sure you're being subservient enough -- which is to say, they want you to latch on to every passing guest like a viral infection and ingratiate yourself. I don't see myself doing that for several reasons -- among them the fact that I don't care how you are and I don't care what brings you to town. Like my city itself, tourist resort that it is, I have a love/hate relationship with the tourists. Like the city, I want your money, but I couldn't care less if you flip the car on your way back home.
This kind of attitude is what you get after several years catering to, usually, fictional problems made up by hotel guests who are looking to make someone as miserable as they are, and who have succeeded marvelously with me.
And don't even get me started on the goddamn breakfast. I have go prepare about twenty different items for consumption by upwards of 250 people -- while running back and forth to the front desk to attend to calls and guests - and not get a drop of it on my clothes, because management thinks the night auditors don't have enough to do. It was their decision that the auditors do it all, so that the breakfast attendant doesn't have anything to do but maintain it and refill as necessary. So there I am, scrambling eggs and gagging from the smell of it, in a suit and tie, and going home with egg stench clinging to me.
So all in all, this job is not off to a good start. If the audit goddess is to be believed, this trend will continue.
What do I do? I'm already as "hateful as a nurse" (so one of my partners medical coworkers pronounced me) from this.