BotH:Chapter 8

Chapter 8
Residents, part 1

In addition to renting out rooms nightly, our guests had the option of buying a resident or suite. The suites were regular rooms and the residents were custom-built condos on the top few floors of The Resort. This first owner that I am about to discuss is rich and famous-ish so I am not going to give any specific details about who he is... He owned a resident and I interacted with him several times, dreading it each and every time.

When we first learned that Mr. Live would be visiting his residence for the first time, our Food and Beverage manager sent out a memo on how to pronounce his name correctly and would randomly test employees. "It's Live like Hive not live like give." I can understand that if you paid millions of dollars to live somewhere you'd want the staff to pronounce your name correctly, but it was a little annoying. Before I met him for the first time, I heard lots of hearsay about him from the Restaurant Manager who was one of my friends. She told me it was hard to respect a person that came into the restaurant with women other than his wife. I've never seen his wife and I don't know if he was cheating on her, but the manager was pretty convinced that he was.

The first time I delivered a meal to his room I had gotten over being star struck when I met celebrities. I knocked on the door, asked if I could come in and he let me in, but only into the foyer. Forbes/AAA wanted us to setup a guest's food on their actual table, so I had to make a quick adjustment to my routine to figure out what to do with all of his food. I showed him what everything was (we used metal covers to help keep things hot), and as I proceeded to leave gave me a firm handshake (weird) and told me it was nice to meet me. That sounds normal enough, but he did it in a way that made me feel like he thought I had come in as a gushing fan and was so humbled to meet him, when in reality it was laughable that he treated me like that. I didn't gush. I said his name properly and did all of my usual protocol. Anyway, the entire first meeting was awkward and I would always try to get someone else to deliver his food. Carlos told me that I had to serve him. Blah. Another time I went to deliver his breakfast -- $125 for 4 people...they all had filet mignon and eggs-- and do you know how much he tipped me? $1.99. That's right!! Everyone in the department had a good laugh about it. But, in his defense we had a wicked steep auto-gratuity. Unfortunately as servers we had to split the auto-grat between everyone that worked that shift and only write-in tips (or cash) went directly to the server. Anyway, he always seemed to make such a big scene about being around and it got old, quick.

The second guest that owned a suite (not a resident) is/was the co-creator (or CEO?) of a famous medical website. He was really nice and I loved serving him breakfast. He almost always got eggs Benedict. It's funny how you remember what people ordered, especially if they were regulars. Anyway, Mr. Badger was at The Resort Monday through Wednesday, then spent the weekends in New York. Every time you went to his room and delivered his meals, he'd tip $20! My kind of guy. After almost a year of being open we started to offer a grocery service to our guests (such a pain in the butt) and we would always go stock his room before he got there and rotate his beverages throughout the week. He was a fitness buff from what I saw in his room-- fitness magazines, protein powders, etc. It turns out he was a swinger and asked out one of the restaurant managers for a drink. Although other employees had taken him up on the drink offer, this particular manager kindly declined.

It was interesting to see how people in the spotlight treated the people who served them. I really enjoyed working with Mr. Badger whereas Mr. Live was no treat. There was always a buzz about in the back of the house when either was on property.