BotH: Chapter 2

I feel like I need to give enough background for you to understand the irony or humor in certain situations, so I apologize, but hopefully this will be one of the last "background" chapters.

Chapter 3
Do's and Don'ts

The first two days of my employment at The Resort was intensive brand training. Brand training consisted of the history of The Resort (it has a lot of locations around the world), the do's and don'ts of service, and the do's and don'ts of our resort in particular. The next two weeks were then broken down into training in our departments.

I was in awe the first few days. That is the best way to describe it. The Resort is huge, easily the biggest hotel I had ever been in, and it was fancy. When you walked around and toured the property that was the only word to come into mind- fancy. Walking around the back of the house (non-public/employee-only areas) was confusing at first, but it almost felt like you were working on a cruise ship. The main floor to the guest was actually the third floor for employees. It was like being in the belly of the beast.

With a resort this big and with a reputation to uphold (Candace, you may giggle here) there were a lot of rules. Employees couldn't clock in more than five minutes before/after a shift. This was sometimes problematic since most employees were shuttled to the resort from the other side of the mountain and the shuttle only came every thirty minutes. This was probably the most complained about situation for the first few months. Employees weren't allowed on the property when they weren't on their shift unless they had permission--really funny story about this one. Employees had to meet/exceed all of Forbes' 5-Star and AAA 5-Diamond requirements for service. Not as easy as you'd think. You could say "assist" but not "help." Appropriate ways of saying "yes" were, "absolutely," "certainly," "but of course," and "it would be my pleasure." Use the guest's name whenever possible. Never say "guys" as in, "how are you guys doing today" unless the entire group was male. Things like that. Very nit picky, very important to The Resort, and really hard to get used to.

Luckily for me AAA and Forbes didn't include or rate banquets in their criteria to obtain a 5 star/diamond status. Unluckily for me my Banquet Manager was...a piece of work, and she was probably more strict than any undercover AAA/Forbes employee. Even after being trained, we couldn't set the tables until she showed us how before each event. You couldn't go on your lunch break, even if it was scheduled, until she told you it was okay. Needed to go to the bathroom? Better ask Melissa. Couldn't find her? Then you my friend were SOL. Big time. A lot of these do's and don'ts were unnecessary, but some were obviously important even if it was hard to understand why at the time.