Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Things I've Learned, Part II

Upon further reflection, I realize there are a few more things that I've learned in the last few days:
  • Folks who consider customers as an inconvenience probably shouldn't work in the hospitality industry.
  • While negotiating prices in Mexico's open markets may be half the fun, I have no fun whatsoever doing it. I feel like the Ugly American. And that's probably what they count on.
  • I don't mind if my kids get yelled at for being loud if others' kids are yelled at by the same people for the same reason. I'm still waiting for the kids shouting outside the hotel right now to get yelled at. But I'm not going to be the yeller, because I choose not to be bitter and vindictive.
  • A kid who has a bad cough is of course the kid who's going to elect to sleep in your hotel room on your side of the bed.
I should probably say something about the yelling/customers as inconvenience thing, so both are put into contest that won't make me sound like an asshole.

Because we're in warmer climes for the holidays, I took my kids swimming at the hotel's outdoor pool today. As kids are wont, as they were splashing and swimming and playing, they were shouting. Twice someone from the hotel office came out to ask my kids politely to shut up because, according to the first lady, "when my employees hear yelling [in the pool] they come a-running," and, second, because "we can hear them all the way in the office and we get worried."

So I have to ask myself: Come a runnin' for what? To rescue some poor, hapless drowning soul or just to holler at them for hollering? And what are you worried about? Upsetting other guests and such? Your pool rules clearly state that since no lifeguard is on duty those who swim assume liability for any accidents or incidents -- so if one of my kids drowns in the pool, it's my fault, not yours. So don't tell me you're going to come a runnin' and let me assume it's because you're on some kind of good Samaritan lifeguard duty. It's because you don't want the yelling. And I'm okay with that. If you don't want the yelling, then come tell me and I'll do my best to quiet down the three kids under ten I've got screaming in the pool. (And maybe that's the reason they came a runnin', because there's been another family with kids running and screeching outside and as far as I can tell they haven't been yelled at for yelling because they're not in the pool.) And if you don't want pool liability issues, then by all means turn the pool into a sand pit.

Other things I've learned:
  • My in-laws, in their entire lives, have never had a pleasant experience with Flagstaff, Arizona, though they have visited the city several times. They don't even know why people would want to live there.
  • Scott Adams is kind of a wiener (I got "The Dilbert Future" for Christmas, and it appears that as much as Adams may be adept at drawing office comics, he pretty much stinks as a futurist. And has only questionable value as a homo sapien.
  • While I choose not to be bitter or vindictive over the whole pool/yelling thing, I will do the passive aggressive thing and write a blog post about it, though I won't identify the hotel we're at unless you send me an e-mail requesting the information.
  • Having escaped the snows of Idaho for a week, the only thing drawing me back into colder climes is employment.
  • And I don't know why employment has such an attraction, as the company I work for is going to lay off 600 employees this year including 100 the week after we get back to work in January. They lay off subs in batches first. I'm a sub. I'm doomed.
  • Folks who take 'Taint off every year shouldn't advertise jobs that close on Dec. 31.
  • Newspapers sucked me into an anti-technological time warp that robbed me of ten years of advancement. Before I worked for a newspaper, I was blogging, writing basic bonehead HTML code and such. There just wasn't an environment for that in the papers I worked for. It's good to hear other papers are doing better. But they're all still doomed.
  • I like saying things that I'm no longer involved with are doomed.
  • It's not that they're doomed because I left them, but because they were already marginal enough to hire idiots like me.

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