Skip to main content

Half Moon

We checked into the hotel close to midnight after a long drive. The lobby area was heavily decorated for Halloween with a ghost presiding over the front desk. A woman came over in a couple of minutes to check us in. I opened the door and walked into piles of clothing, an unmade bed and strong smells. Apparently the system had not registered the person had extended their stay, marked the room as clean and given it to us. They system also showed there were no other rooms available. The woman continued to smile a big smile at us even as my frustration mounted with time and growing tiredness. She offered no solutions other than repeating that her supervisor was on her way. For a well know hotel chain to commit this kind of faux pas placing customer privacy and safety at risk was already mind boggling but that unrelenting smile on that woman’s face was even more aggravating. 

At some point in the next hour that we waited to have the situation resolved, I realized that half of her face was paralyzed giving her a permanent smile. It made me think about the great difficulties she must face everyday in a customer service role with such a handicap where she is unable to convey any expression except the one her face is frozen into. My aggravation over the situation faded as I felt sorry for her unique plight. She was dealing with the same problems as her peers - bad system design, poor workflow management, lack of autonomy to make game time decisions when that’s an essential job function given the diversity of situations humans can bring about, she had this unsolvable problem that could make a bad situation significantly worse. 

I had a good mind to file a complaint with the hotel's VP of customer service about the what had transpired. But considering that the only outcome of such a complaint would be some punishment of this poor woman who had no role in causing the trouble I had experienced. That would be the way the hotel would make me whole and bury the sins of their leadership's incompetence. I knew that I definitely did not want that outcome for me or for this woman who God had blessed with an unfading half room smile.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more