It’s not every day that you encounter so many people in any given experience who are just dumb as a box of rocks. This weekend I stayed at the Hyatt Arlington in Washington, DC basically because I had no choice. From the people who answered the phone and gave directions to the hotel to the women supposedly in charge of checking you in, right down to the “Guest Services” department, these yo yos were impossible. I cannot spend too much time on this because I’ll get all wound up, but these people COULD NOT HAVE BEEN DUMBER, LAMER, RUDER.
Being extremely compulsive at TPG worldwide, we not only get confirmations of rooms, etc. when we book them but get the name of the person with whom we spoke, time, etc. After not only booking everything correctly in the first place, we called the day prior to confirm (see the frequent use of this word confirm, reconfirmed, ok it’s confirmed) that we had adjoining rooms with xyz bed set up, etc. Got the names of everyone with whom we spoke… We go to check in. Not only do they only check us into one room (as opposed to the two adjoining rooms???) resulting in us having to go down to the desk again after an already nightmarish flight across the country to “check in” again to the second room. By the way, while in the lobby the first time, I drew a MAP of where the rooms were supposed to be in relation to each other to simplify things. Apparently it was the first time these people had ever taken reservations for adjoining rooms?? Evidently that “associate” didn’t realize that while I was paying for both rooms, that meant that I actually planned on using them.
Anyway, we get upstairs and the “adjoining” door has a giant desk in front of it and the room was so small I can’t even imagine where the desk was supposed to go otherwise. A call downstairs seemed to baffle the people at the desk as to what the problem was. Anyway, shocker, the beds weren’t right, the rooms couldn’t be accessed, check-in hadn’t gone as planned, the “comped” breakfast passes we were supposed to get didn’t really materialize. The ice machines on each floor started breaking like a string of dominos to the point that you would encounter other guests in the elevator (also with ice buckets in hand) and at that point you swapped info as to which machines on which floors were non-functioning so everyone could run to one that actually worked (or worked for the moment). The second night the “heater” started to blow up convincing me that the building was in fact burning down. Please remember that it was 97 degrees in DC this weekend with 4000% humidity. I find that in the most stressful of situations the added dose of life threatening, oppressive humidity makes a big difference in keeping everyone’s moods positive. Finally when it was 12 o’clock at night and engineering still hadn’t showed up, we turned the air off and called off the troops. At this housekeeping director responded “Oh, so now you don’t want anyone??” and hung up on us! Hung up on the guest!!! This is a first for me! The building was burning. For all I knew a plane had just flown into the Hyatt (this was DC after all) and I was just trying to tell rock stars in “engineering” about the predicament.
So, on this short trip, the issues involved, but were not limited to (learned that phrase from my lawyer, not in regards to this incident however) the following:
* Desk staff was unable to give directions when guests were two blocks away
* “Oh, I didn’t know you were checking into both rooms right now” when there were four of us standing there checking in and the frickin’ rooms were all in my name!
* No breakfast passes
* Daily scavenger hunts for ice
* Burning electrical equipment
* Unavailable engineers to fix said burning electrical equipment (perhaps they were assisting the night crew with reservations?)
* And on and on and on and on, but remember that I wasn’t going to delve into this too much so I’ll stop there.
Next question from loyal readers: So, did you write all of this on the survey card? No, because I would only have two words for them and even I’m not that mean: START OVER. Thank goodness that the rest of my weekend was so fun, fabulous, inspiring and educational that not even the Hyatt Arlington could send me to the psychiatrist. So the point of this blog? On the car ride back from the airport, we decided to come up with a preliminary list of jobs for stupid-people-who-do-not-want-to-be-in-their-current-positions.
The following jobs have little or no contact with others and are perfect when you’re dumb as a box of rocks like every yo yo at the Hyatt Arlington. This is just a partial list (remember it was late last night) and we will be adding to it as time goes on. So, if you’re mean, stupid or just don’t care, why not try out these lines of work:
* Brick layer
* Person who paints lines on the freeway (possibility of getting run over)
* Person who puts books back on the shelf at the library (cannot double as a librarian)
* Painter of large outdoor buildings requiring scaffolding so you only go down to use the restroom or at the end of the day
* Assembly line worker in loud factory hindering ability to communicate due to noise
Notes: Please feel free to email me ( Marley@thepartygoddess.com ) any other ideas you may have for rude people. Also, if you are head of the brick layers’ union, no need to send me an email espousing your craft. All jobs mentioned above are important, yet seem better suited for individuals with “challenged” personalities and not front desk clerks at major hotels. My apologies, that was a long one.
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