Duty meals - Part 1
Recently I attended a hotel association conference where I was a speaker for one of their breakout sessions. The opening morning of the convention started with a breakfast where we listened to the many great developments within the association in the past year and heard a fantastic story from the morning keynote about evacuating an entire city without one casualty or serious injury from an oncoming forest fire.
What a morning! But the thing that got me more than anything else that day was a memory. The memory of being in that very room some 35 years earlier having breakfast all by myself. You see it was the hotel and dining room where I signed my very first duty meal.
A free meal is something special for most people, especially when it is a good one. What I mean is, most people only get a free meal when they are at someone else’s house for dinner or a BBQ or a free meal from a nice restaurant when someone else is paying. These are not the same as a duty meal. That free meal with friends or a salesperson has strings attached. You are either on the hook next time or they want you to buy something. Duty meals in hotels are quite different indeed.
Going back those 35 years, I had been working in this hotel for a couple of years by then. I had started in the very same room as a busboy not some 20 months earlier. It was 1985. By my measurement in those days I was on the fast track.
I had transferred to this hotel from another in the same company from the other end of the country. Which really meant they offered me a job as a busboy making $1.90 an hour and in order to collect my first paycheck, I had to drive 4,500 kilometers (yes, I’m from Canada) and there was no moving allowance–zip.
In the previous hotel I also had worked for two years. I worked the bars as a waiter and bartender then found what I called a real job in the receiving and stores department that last summer. Summer ended and the company offered me a transfer west. Almost all the way west and getting there was my own deal.
I remember the trip well.
The first stop was Montreal to stay with a good bartender friend from the hotel. We ripped it up pretty good including a late night joint down on St. Catherine’s St. Then it was on to North Bay where I met a good friend for a quiet weekend in a cabin on the shores of Lake Nipissing. Then it was the serious part of the drive, into Wisconsin under Lake Superior and across the Canadian border again to catch the Yellow Head Highway north to Edmonton. Just in time to grace my big brother’s wedding.
From there it was south to my new home and new job. I registered myself, so to speak, in the staff residence by checking in with a friend from my old hotel who I happened to meet in the parking lot shortly after my arrival. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that the staff accommodations office found out I was “squatting” there. They were not pleased to say the least.
Getting settled into my new job was not easy. I didn’t like taking a step backward (going back to busboy). In my last hotel I was a somebody. Here I was one among many busboys and that was not where I wanted to be. Before I left my last hotel, I was told to put in my time and do a good job and “something” would come up. I bided my time only to learn that the slow season was coming quickly and that meant very few hours for several weeks until the Christmas rush.
To be continued…
David Lund – The hotel Financial Coach
Contact David at (415) 696-9593
|
|
|
|
