I’ve said before, you work in the hospitality industry long enough and you’ll be able to say with no small amount of confidence that you’ve seen everything. Today has convinced me that even though as early as this morning I thought I’d seen everything in the past nearly eight years, I was absolutely and completely wrong.
My first inkling of this probably should have become apparent when I was first assigned the contract for this group, a multi-level marketing conflagration of 600 people dealing in ‘essential oils’ purported to do everything from taking ten years from your looks to adding twenty to fifty years to your life. Not only could they accomplish that, they could relax you just by inhaling them and were even used in massage therapies. A few were ingestible and our Chef was incorporating them into the group’s menus although by his own admission, “You open that rosemary or sage and man, it knocks you over. You have to leave the room.”
Therein lie the rub, no pun intended. “So you’d like,” I attempted to clarify two months ago, standing in an empty ballroom with four members of their planning committee, “to use this space – “ I gestured rather vaguely at the nearly 11,000 s.f. we were standing in, “for a massage center?”
“For aroma touch therapy,” their apparent leader corrected me. “For the first day of the program, we provide aroma touch therapy, then we move into General Sessions for the weekend.”
I considered that. Didn’t see a problem, actually. I mean, so long as they didn’t spill anything on the carpeting. For the record, that’s all people in my position are ultimately concerned with. We’ve got all kinds of rules, regulations, policies and standards but everything’s open for negotiation if the revenue’s right and you can accomplish your purposes without messing up the carpet. Couldn’t be much different than what our own spa did when they offered seated chair massages, is what I was thinking.
Yesterday, as the program rolled out, I was reminded that my own thinking is not always to be trusted. Rather than the ‘demonstration chairs’ discussed, which were to be unloaded at a very convenient lot on the north end of our property, what was delivered – unscheduled – to our receiving dock several stories below the main level of the hotel and absolutely not of a size to accommodate such a surprise for too long – were no less than nine pallets, each approximately 8’ high, of shrink-wrapped boxes, each one containing a full size massage table.
It’s been my week, apparently, to work out my receiving dock karma because once more I found my way down there, having remittent flashbacks to the Fed Ex Tube Debacle of the tail end of last week which saw me down there several times. I called the client, explained the situation, and they promptly admitted it was their error, or rather the error of their shipping company. They’d send some of their people right over to move the pallets. I then explained they couldn’t do that because at this point we’d received them and I couldn’t, for liability reasons, allow guests in the dock area, or to be moving freight. What I could do, and what I did do, was contact our Set Up staff to move the pallets to the ballroom, at a substantial ‘handling’ (read: this is heavy and it hurts) fee, which the client agreed to immediately as they’d no sooner have it paid than they’d bill back their freight company for the error.
That accomplished and my dock manager somewhat placated (what could I say except I’m very, very, very sorry it was my group that took every square inch of your available space this morning when all you really wanted was somewhere for the food deliveries to land) I finished the day checking on members of the group who had by then arrived to disassemble the towering pallets and set up the massage tables. Everything looked fine when I went home. It was a ballroom of massage tables, water stations, and observation chairs.
It was really quite ordinary, I thought, and I thought that until maybe an hour after the ‘aroma therapy meeting’ got underway because it was at this point that the overpowering aroma of their ‘essential oils’ had permeated every square inch of a very substantial ballroom hallway and all the meeting space on the first floor. An area, to give you a perspective, exactly equal to the east side of a building set squarely on ten acres.
It’s OK, I assured just about everybody, as everybody I encountered had a comment about the heavy eau du lemongrass/patchouli/ spearmint/ rosemary/ sage/ cinnamon/ grapefruit that hung over the atmosphere like one of our worst winter inversions. They’re being very careful, I was quick to point out. Nothing was getting spilled on the carpet. This last seemed to placate just about every inquiry. We’re all alike, in this industry.
With a cell phone call from the group’s planner roughly every two and a half minutes, I went through the day alternating between the cell phone, the dispatch radio, and conversations explaining why our luxury hotel now smelled like the inside of an overloaded herbal sachet. Things finally quieted down early into the evening when I decided to walk by the ballroom again and just assure myself that, if nothing else, the carpets were still unscathed.
“You have naked people out there,” my boss observed, as I passed by her office.
“I’m sorry? I have what?”
“Naked people,” she said, more calmly than my former boss would ever have managed. She, of course, had done my job for years before taking hers so she was a bit less easily surprised. “You know, walking around in those little paper gowns. Without bras or anything.”
Another small detail left out of the group’s specs. Another small detail that made this meeting much, much different from those seated chair massages our spa provided.
“Great,” I said, thinking of the other two programs in the ballroom space and how much time we had between the end of the aroma touch meeting and the arrival of guests for other programs who probably wouldn’t want to encounter…well, people without bras in paper clothing wandering the halls. “I’ll go take a look,” I assured my boss.
“Many of them,” she observed drily, “really need to have a bra on.”
A few minutes later I walked into our ballroom ladies room, a sprawl of marble and limitless stalls you could put my condominium into no less than four times. What had once been a pristine and true ‘powder room’ replete with its own seating area was now an upscale rendition of, well, the ladies locker room in your basic Gold’s Gym. The first thing I saw (and I truly wish it hadn’t been) was a pile of discarded blue paper gowns, very much like what you get to wear at the doctor’s office, only not fabric and certainly not imprinted with fall leaves or something equally cheerful. They were wedged into the counter openings designed for the linen hand towels, every single one of the counter openings. The second thing I saw (and I’m still trying to get the image out of my head, trust me) were four women without bras, two of which did not, at that point, actually have any manner of underthing on, and one of which was cupping her breasts in her hands and surveying them in the floor length mirror with an interest level that should never be displayed in a public restroom. Even if it did, at that point, more or less resemble a gym.
Sometimes all you can do is look away, wash your hands so it appeared you had a purpose to be in the bathroom at all, return to your office, give a heads up to housekeeping that they’d need to pull a lot of paper dresses out of places they’d only ever expect to find linen hand towels, and be happier than you could express that you were mere minutes from going home for the day.
Which is exactly what I did.
“So was I right?” my boss asked, and I just shook my head, not stopping as I headed to my desk. “I’ve just seen more naked female flesh than I ever wanted to see in my life,” I observed, which my cohorts in the office seemed to find hysterically funny.
“Oh come on,” Casey called out, “I had the lactation station with that pharmaceutical group.”
“And I,” Diane reminded me, still laughing, “had the breast exam room. Remember how many Set Up guys offered to refresh the water stations in there?”
“I had the six foot replicas of private parts,” my boss chimed in, “remember that gynecological seminar?”
That started the whole Mortified Memories Lane thing in earnest, and the last few minutes of the day were spent swapping horror stories of events past that, in hindsight, really weren’t that bad and someday would even be funny. Really, they reminded me. This isn’t the worst thing.
Easy for them to say. They’re not the ones who have to somehow, between now and ten o’clock when they go to bed, shake that whole bathroom visual out of their heads.
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