Cynthia Buchan (Edison) Listening Skills…?

I work in the customer service slash hospitality industry. Meaning that people are usually on vacation or business when they are arriving. I haven’t ever really been on a serious vacation so I wouldn’t know how crazy it makes someone but I am starting to see that it creats a level of stupidity for most. I am just appaled sometimes at how oblivious people are to their surroundings. The establishment that I work at (can’t mention name) it’s equiped with a restaurant on the backside between the building and the bay. Not an entirely huge eating area or kitchen for that matter but can handle a pretty hefty tourist season of Naples and a wedding reception if scheduled through management.

Upon checkin there is a registration card that the guet is instructed to fill out and is given details for each section of the card and what to put where. It is inevitable that 98% of all guests will fill out this form incorrectly! They are intructed to initial next to the source of the reservation, vehicle desciption “NO LISENCE PLATE” is the section across from the source, then it’s the no smoking/no pets policy initial section, and finally a signature at the bottom. From what I’ve noticed the vehicle description “no lisence plate” section seems to be hardest for people to understand. Example; I will be checking someone in get through the instructions of the whole registration card and the guest will literally within 5 seconds after I finish inform me that they don’t know their lisence plate! One other reason this is difficult for people to understand is most who are arriving and no less driving here have no clue what they are driving their families around town in, don’t have a clue what kind of car they are driving and sometimes don’t even know what’s the color of this vehicle. To think that some of these people are actually considered productive members of society and probably vote on a regular basis for the last number of years!?!?! Where are people’s minds going these days, seems like they are slowly tossing them out the window. This isn’t even the half of it!

The evening before breakfast when guests checkin they are given a verbal list of amenities and information on the hours of operation for the restaurant; for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They are told where their room and the pool is located within the hotel and what time check out is supposed to be along with the check out time written on the key card cover that they are given. This information becomes irrelevant very quickly almost as soon as before they even leave the front desk. I have a rediculous number of guests that will shortly after checking in ask me all of the amenities that were rattled off to them at the beginning. Espeically early in the morning when there are a bunch of people just outside the class doors to the restaurant out back and there is people out there eating or tables and chairs with little silverware items on them and a waiter “Oh my gosh a waiter outside, on the back terrace, what they hell would he be doing out there?” Let’s go ask the front desk where we can get breakfast or a cup of coffee, as if it wasn’t already obvious.

I may be rambling about something that I can’t fix or that wouldn’t bother most others but really if you dealt with for hours and days on end I think it would really start to get under your skin too. I just sometimes have to laugh it off b/c it’s so hard for me to believe that people actually live their lives this way, its chaos! It feels like the whole world is just getting dumber and dumber as the days go by and as the economy gets worse. I wonder if there’s ever been a study on the population of an economy that is reaching shambles to see if the intelligence is effected by it all? I bet someone has tried! Someone like me that’s just watched people seem and act like they are alot more stupid than they used to be.

This entry was posted on 6. April 2009 at 15:04 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.