BotH: Chapter 11

Chapter 11
10 kinds of crazy

The Resort offered great packages for companies as an incentive to get them to stay, dine, and play with us. We had a group come in, the Smith-Colby Group, and they took up around 50 room and had every meal and snack with us as well as booked up all of our conference rooms for a few days. It was the most hectic week of my life there and a lot of planning went into making it easier on the employees to handle.

The Smith-Colby Group had breakfast, lunch, and dinner banquets everyday in between which they had meetings and in between the meetings were "snack" stations throughout the hotel. As a banquet team most of us worked splits (5am-9am and 5pm-9pm) to handle the load. This meant that I was waking up at 3:45 am so that I'd leave my house by 4:15 and would catch the 4:45 shuttle to the hotel. This particular week I lived off of 5-hr energy drinks and Powerade. After my shift (which usually ended late) I would go home, sleep, then wake up and repeat the same morning schedule in the afternoon all over again. All week. Rough. Imagine an entire team running this schedule. Things got crazy fast. This also didn't include the extra shift we picked up to help private dining with their portion of the load (which was the coffee stations/snacks in between meetings) throughout the day. They had to synchronize delivering coffee and snacks twice a day to about 20 rooms at a time with just a few servers and two elevators. Yeah, things got interesting there. Luckily they were really well organized and most of the things went well on their end. We (banquet members and butlers) sat and packaged snacks (all custom made, too) for each room, everyday, as well as helping them with their regular service. They also paid for drinks and packaged (non-custom) snacks per item, so that was challenging to bill. All the servers had to drop off, refill, and count missing items in about a five minute time span in each room they visited each time. Luckily I wasn't one of those servers, I was a prep and bill person for the week. If that sounds hectic, you should have seen banquets. That's where the "real" fun began.

By the middle of the week we were really worn out and things were tense. One meal in particular I was assigned to be a greeter. Little did I know that the servers were getting their butts handed to them since all of the guests came to breakfast (?) at once. This is the one and only time that I got on Candace's bad side (and trust me, you knew if you were). About three-quarters of the way through the meal my manager asked me to go join the rest of the servers, so I did. In the back of the house Candace reamed me for not helping sooner. She didn't know that I was assigned to stand as a greeter per the client's request, and was furious because she thought I was doing nothing while they were all running to catch up with the rush -- end of the story was that I ended up sitting in the ballroom once guests were gone crying since it wasn't my fault the meal went poorly. I tried to transfer to private dining for the day to help them and they said I had to have my manager approve it. Then I looked like an idiot crying in front of my manager asking to switch someone for the day. I was broken. I ended up still going back to finish the day in banquets, and things were a little awkward between Candace and I for a couple days, but things ended up being fine. I think the thing that was even worse than that encounter was my manager at one of the dinners. We had completely set up the ballroom for dinner, which takes quite a while when you have to polish every piece of silverware and every glass, plus folding all the napkins. My manager walked in just as we were finishing and decided she didn't like the napkin fold (which she originally chose) and she made us unfold all of them and do a different one fifteen minutes prior to guests arriving. I was furious. The one really nice thing from the week was that the meeting planner was so impressed with how the core servers did that she gave us a card with lots o' cash in it :)