Journals of a Hotel Manager

At Charlie’s insistence, I allowed him to drive me back to Dubai for my departure. A thick layer of gray smog enveloped Dubai as we approached. The economy has dealt Dubai quite a blow which is evident as many construction sites are being left unfinished. The much hated and anticipated Sky Train is nowhere near to be completed. The iconic Burj Dubai poked into the sky like a jagged stalagmite. Charlie told me the construction has also been halted.

As we drove down the main thoroughfare, we remembered how it had been no more than a two-lane road with sand and acacia bushes on the side when we were working in Dubai all those years ago. Now with six lanes on each side, this road connects to all the emirates from the blue Arabian Gulf to the golden desert in Oman.

The traffic is less congested than a few years ago since many businesses went bust. The word on the street is that more than 6000 work visa have been canceled and hundreds of cars have been left at the airport with keys still in the ignition - their owners couldn’t even be bothered with having the cars sold. Such is the ruthless impact on this artificial paradise that the rumor is circulating about closure of and compulsory unpaid leave at several top end hotels.

Despite its modern image, workers on their Sunday best can still be seen on the curb of the highway hoping to flag down the rare bus to take them to the city. Bangladeshi and Pakistani maintenance workers with shovels and brooms on the highway wear their traditional turban and long tunic under the safety vest, while their Indian supervisor waited in the safety of the car with nothing but a clipboard and a bottle of water in his hands. The faces in crowded buses that ferry manual laborers between construction sites and their accommodation are mostly brown, weary and lifeless.

In many ways Dubai hasn’t changed. The rich carry on living in majestic villas built by immigrant workers who work mostly at night to avoid the searing heat during the day. The laborers continue to pour into Dubai to earn about $100 a month because they cannot find a job at home. The locals in their flowing robes never cease to jump line in supermarkets and at taxi stands, and no one dares to argue with them. The numerous America-style mega malls still consume gazillion-watts of electricity to keep the neon signs lit, the air cool and the appearance of utter luxury.

I wonder if the bubble of Dubai will finally burst with the current economic crisis. Their oil reserve has long been on the brink of depletion hence the development into this man-made attraction. Despite my lack of fondness of Dubai, as the plane lifted off and the wounded concrete jungle faded into view, I wish Dubai all the best of luck.

Burj Dubai photo as of Jan 21st, 2009 from Wikipedia.com

Charlie, the GM here, invited me to lunch to catch up. We talked about all the friends we had and the not so good old days all those years ago.

Charlie was reminiscent of our favorite guest from hell, and to protect their reputation let’s just call them the Delta family. They struck gold from importing luxury European goods into the Middle East and established a huge empire throughout the region as well as in parts of Asia. They refused to speak English or Arabic although they were in fact Lebanese. They insisted upon speaking only French.

At that time there were two people in our hotel who spoke French, our French resident manager and me.

One fine Christmas Eve Madame Delta hunted me down. I was working as an assistant manager in banquets and I had done a few private functions for her at her mansion. She was not popular with my staff since Madame insisted on counting every piece of her silverware and chinaware in front of us before we could leave her home. But money was no subject for her so she was one of my top accounts.

This day the request was simple. Could Monsieur Banquet Manager possibly arrange a Santa for Madame’s children? Absolutely! Just as I was about to elaborate, Madame continued, “And I want the Santa to descend from a helicopter, taking many gifts with him. It will thrill my children. You can arrange that, no?”

“I will be happy to look into that. When is the party, Madame?”

“Why, this afternoon of course. Tomorrow is Christmas Day already!” she retorted incredulously.

We were trained to never to say no to guests and especially not to Madame Delta. I enlisted Charlie and the two of us frantically called a dozen of companies, authorities, and air force. We managed to find a helicopter but couldn’t secure the landing rights in her garden.

“Oh, my children will be so disappointed.”

I could imagine Madame pouting on the other end of the phone when I informed her of this unhappy development. I was not about to let this piece of business fly away. She could fill in our budget very nicely.

As my creative juices bubbled away, I sold Madame the idea of the Santa descending not from a helicopter, but from a camel. Since we were in the desert, I thought a camel would be even more impressive. She reluctantly agreed when I convinced her no other hotel would take a last minute request on Christmas Eve to do an outside catering function.

The camel was easy. Many hotels had their own camel supplier on call for special events to take guest for a ride in the garden. I chose three clean looking plastic laundry trolleys so I could pile her mountain of gifts inside, like a mini train. I made Charlie dress up in the Santa suit. A few platters of fish fingers, mini pizzas, chocolate cookies for the children and some caviar and cheese for the adults later, we stacked ourselves, food and camel included, into our banquet truck and departed for Madame’s mansion in the desert in time for the party.

All went well with the whole Santa on camel scenario: the children were so young that they would not have cared if a two-headed Santa arrived on a seven-legged elephant. As sweating Charlie and I breathed a sigh of relief while Madame distributed her expensive gifts to her three toddlers, the camel opened its legs and went to toilet on Madame’s pristine lawn.

Madame paid for the function at premium price, as usual, but I had to personally drive back to the mansion with a gift to apologize for the camel malfunction.

Well, I am actually near the Oman border in a small desert oasis called Al Ain.  There are so many vacation days outstanding in my calendar that I need to take and with hotel occupancy hovering at around 50%, I think I deserve a few days away from the rock.

I worked in Dubai some years ago when Dubai was just starting to wake up to the new money.  Today Dubai is an exact copy of Las Vegas in my opinion, only bigger and louder without the topless shows.  Throughout the years I have visited Dubai regularly on business trips and seen the tremendous changes.  Let’s just say you could not even pay me to come to Dubai to spend my R&R.

Al Ain is about 90 minutes drive from Dubai and has a totally different feel to it.  It has palm fringed boulevards with a low mountain range on the horizon.  There are no horrific traffic jams or shiny skyscrapers that tickled the sky.  The air is cleaner and the sky bluer.  Hence the destination is popular with expats who live in the hustle and bustle of Dubai as well as for travelers who are looking for a more authentic desert oasis experience than on fake ski slopes or on beaches under the shadow of incessant construction sites.

The hotel I am staying at happens to be the hotel chain I worked for in Dubai all those years ago.  The newly appointed GM used to work at the same hotel so he cut me a pretty good deal.  It’s just my first day here and the temperature in the desert in January is surprisingly cool, especially at night.

The smell of shisha, the taste of a succulent lamb kebab, and the distant evening prayer calls brings back many memories.  Let’s see if I will recuperate enough in the coming few days to recall some of the crazy stories of living in Dubai.

After a long day at work and a whole evening in my office trying to clear my 100million-th email, I came home to find a dark shadow running on the wall. I turned on the light to find a huge gecko in my room. I didn’t leave any window open so how the hell did it come inside? It was huge, must be 10 inches long, with a bulbous head and four large feet with bubble toes. It had beautiful coloring, I must admit, of bright green on dark brown.

I am not too afraid of the little lizards but I feel queasy about the geckos. They are certainly not as ferocious looking as the massive alu, but I have heard some pretty graphic stories about them.

It is said that geckos, despite their suction feet, tend to fall from trees sometimes. Once they fall on people, their first instinct is to bite onto whatever they land. We had an F&B guy, expat, here who had a gecko who bit into his neck after it had fallen down. Startled and obviously painful, he tried to pull the gecko off but the reptile latched on even more securely, resulting in a whole chunk of flesh missing and an ugly scar. Apparently the correct method is to splash cold water over the gecko to induce it to release its bite.

I was not about to suffer insomnia just to worry about if this gecko was going to fall on my face while I slept. So I rolled up a Condé Nast and tried to chase it out of the door. Surprisingly, this gecko was determined to make ‘mi casa su casa’. It ran further into the room and rested atop an air-conditioning unit, dangling its long tail provokingly on one side.

I got a bit upset so I found an umbrella and shoved it off its perch. Once on the tile floor, the gecko finally ran towards the door, but no! It went into my ficus pot. I ran to the plant and gave the terracotta pot a vicious kick, resulting in breaking the pot and spilling mud all over my living room. (Note to self: must call housekeeping and gardener to clean up and replace pot)

Now I was angry. I loved that pot and that ficus. It provided a soothing presence when I arrive home, unlike this creature on hand. I started to poke wildly into the dirt and surely enough the gecko couldn’t hide anymore. It crawled out, turned around and looked at me. I swear that it sneered at me and hissed. As I stomped my feet heavily on the ground - I was not about to squash it underfoot and have to scrape it up with Condé Nast - it eventually went through the door and back into the wild jungle night.

I shut the door and discovered that I had a sheen of cold sweat all over me. Time to get out of this xxxxing island. What’s next? In bed with a vegetarian crocodile?

I was invited to speak to the graduating class at the nearby hotel school. There are only two on the island and this is considered the better one since it’s government-run and sponsored by the UNDP. It is essentially a vocational school providing training to high school graduates.

The classroom was dim with low ceiling. Air-conditioning was nowhere to be found. When I entered a waft of stale sweat and adolescent hormones enveloped me. A room of more than 80 students awaited me. Curiously, more than half of them were girls. They ranged from 17 to 20 years of age and it was a refreshing sight to see so many young eager faces, in comparison to my general staff meeting with the average age of 48.

I began with an overview of what to expect when they go into the industry. I advised them not to expect to become a manager on Day One.

“We all had to start from the bottom. I worked as a waiter, a steward and an income auditor before I started to climb up the ladder,” I encouraged them, “If you are good at what you do, you WILL be promoted and eventually you will become a general manager! That’s what you want to become, right?”

Blank faces.

True, I thought, with the economy as such and hotels laying staff off everyday, where would these 80 young people go? Would they ever find just a job, let alone in the hospitality industry?

Or was I speaking too fast?

I shifted gear and asked several students what was their ideal job after graduation. Girls unanimously voted for reception. I can see why. Reception girls get the best looking uniform and if they are lucky they get a sitting job like behind the guest relations desk. And the job is considered a lot less dirty than, let’s say, a restaurant waiter who touches half chewed food, a housekeeper who cleans an unflushed toilet or the job no one wanted: dishwashing steward who never even gets to meet a guest.

Boys, on the other hand, mostly chose F&B. I can totally relate since when I was about twenty years old all I could think of was how not to feel hungry all the time, and to get my hands on as much alcohol as I could.

As the discussion got carried away we came to the topic of beverage cost control. I threw in some beverage theft examples just for the sake of telling a good story. They didn’t react when I mentioned how a bottle of Chateaux Lafite was nearly lifted by a waiter or when I gestured some outrageous serving size of a single malt whiskey.

“OK, who can tell me the difference between a white wine and a red wine?” I threw the question in just to see if they were still awake.

Seeing no response, I pointed to a boy with spiky hair and asked, “Can you tell me, then, why is the red wine red?”

“Uh, because the red wine is in the oven longer?” he answered with a question, hoping I would concur.

I could use a double shot of whiskey then. Yep, this bunch of graduates will have to start from the very bottom of the ladder, like, go to a real hotel school.

I ran into Max, our flamboyant and theatrical German chef, who stank from his morning shopping trip to the local fish market, near the loading dock. He showed off a box full of snappers, groupers, and prawns as if he wanted to sell them to me. I congratulated him on his fine choices.

“Ja, you can say that again, boss,” said he, “because today I really got into a fishing boat to make sure the fishes are fresh.”

The story turned out that Max had not been too happy with the catch on display in the market. He asked his main supplier, an old wrinkled guy called Nyoman, to take him fishing once in a while. By paying 10% extra, Max promised to buy whatever Nyoman hauled from the net.

This morning turned out to be a lucky day hence the beautiful catch which would make our Thursday night’s seafood buffet even better.

“When he pulled the snappers in they were zo fresh, ja, and zo many! I was very happy so I started to rock the boat a bit, ja, you know, just to show I am happy,” Max continued his triumphant adventure, “But Nyoman turned completely pale, ja, and grabbed the side of the boat. I say, ‘What’s with you man? You afraid of the water?’ You know what he said, boss? He said he cannot zwim!”

Max slapped his forehead in melodramatic disbelief.

“But the man has been a fisherman all his life! Can you believe it?”

No, indeed I cannot. This island is a curious place. It is surrounded by beautiful water but very few locals enjoy the sea. They consider water impure, where the garbage ends up. Instead they worship the majestic volcano. Apart from the dozen or so youngsters who learned surfing from tourists, you hardly see any locals hanging on the beach.

It must take poor old Nyoman a lot of courage to go out to sea daily to earn a living. I feel sorry for him should the weather one day turns against him while he is out at sea. At the same time, I admire his tenacity of making a living while he knows he could be killed on any given day. In view of that, my job is much easier as I don’t face certain death everyday on the job. Maybe I should stop whining so much and go back to work.

photo courtesy maikondrum@flickr.com

Security report was the highlight of the morning briefing. Apparently at around 2am, the security officer who toured the spa area found a broken padlock on the stone path.

Our spa is near the main entrance of the hotel. It is one of the best on the island. We boast eleven treatment rooms, each with its own over-sized Jacuzzi bathtub, indoor/outdoor shower, steam room and a pair of antique wooden doors with intricate carvings. Even the padlocks are kind of historic.

As the security officer was investigating he heard giggling from one of the rooms. Surely enough that padlock was missing and even the antique door received an ugly gash. Upon entering the room, he found two Caucasian women and a local young man frolicking in the Jacuzzi, stark naked. There were a dozen or so beer bottles scattered around the room and the three intruders seemed unfazed by the disturbance.

The problem was the security officer was a local boy. He found it difficult to admonish a buleh woman, let alone two naked white women. He unleashed his embarrassment and anger at his own kind, and told the naked young man in the local language to leave the spa immediately. The threesome giggled some more. The security officer called for back-up and was smart enough to call Jane, our Australian spa manager, who had seen her fair share of naked women and was not afraid of them.

The two female guests were not even our hotel guests. They were staying at a cheap B&B somewhere down the beach. The young man, one of those super-tanned attractive youngsters collectively known here on the island as ‘cowboys’, had heard of our famous spa and decided to show off to his new friends. Sadly, there is no point in chasing after him for the damage to our antique doors. He probably makes $5 a day selling ice cream on the beach, where he picks up older, lonely white women who would buy him beers and a good dinner.

There is no luck with the women either. They claimed that they had nothing to do with breaking the door. All they were guilty of was just trespassing. There is no point blacklisting them in our reservation since they will never be able to afford a hotel in our caliber.

All I can do is just be happy that they didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night (I needed a good rest after the union meeting), and source two more antique doors for my bruised spa.

Never a dull moment in my life.

With the economy doing so poorly and Mr. Owner breathing down my neck about cost-cutting, I plan to hold a meeting with the union tomorrow to see if we could reduce some head count or hours. The union here controls every single member of staff, except for the expatriates. That’s right, even all my local division heads belong to the union.

Union meetings tend to be long and intense. Many of the union leaders happen to be line staff such as a dishwasher or a housekeeper. Their English is not fluent but their ideas are numerous. Sometimes the meetings go on for twice as long due to the back and forth translation so a buleh like me can be part of the negotiation.

Through gossiping I heard of two scary incidents between the union and expat general managers. One of them happened not far from our hotel. It was a small European based hotel. The GM somehow upset the union and the negotiation fell through. In broad daylight, the GM was jostled from the meeting room and pushed into the swimming pool, witnessed by his guests sunbathing on loungers. The poor guy tried to come ashore but every time his hands reached the edge of the pool a staff would push him back into the water. This lasted for over an hour until the exhausted GM agreed to the union’s demands.

Another true story happened in the capital city at a famous international hotel. Again the negotiation between management and union went sour. All the expats, the GM, the chef, and the F&B director etc. were herded into the executive office. The doors were boarded up and the expats were left in the executive office for six days. Luckily it was just before festive season. There were plenty of hampers in the office intended for top customers in the city. The expats lived off the cookies and fruits for those six days. Meanwhile, the rioting staff sent all the guests away and turned off the central power (just imagine the spoilage in the cooler and storage). They brought their families to camp out in the lobby, cooked fried rice on kerosene burners, gambled the entire time away, and basically trashed the lobby in an insane party.

The GM managed to contact the embassy of his home country from a cell phone and reported his unhappy misfortune. That didn’t really help since the embassy had no jurisdiction over a private property in their host country. But after pulling some strings and seeing the situation was not to be resolved, the local police stormed the hotel one night and chased the campers out. Needless to say, the riot leaders were dismissed, union demands thrown out, and the expats were released from their temporary prison with no physical injury.

An even more bizarre postscript to this sad story was that one staff member who took the failure of this union negotiation too seriously jumped off the hotel building in protest.

I know my staff are not that extreme and I have full confidence that I will not end up in a pool or imprisoned in my own office. But it is sometimes challenging for me, at the end of a head-splitting union meeting of 8 hours, to smile in agreement with guests, “Yes, aren’t the staff here wonderful?”

I love technology. I am not a tech-snob who goes after the latest phone or computer at any cost. As long as the gadget works and gets things done, I am happy with it.

This cannot be said with our in-house fire alarm system. The hotel was not built to accommodate the latest technological demands. During the most recent renovation, about 10 years ago, all the guest rooms were wired to the central PBX system should a fire breaks out. Once an alarm is triggered, the PBX will send out a CODE RED signal to all users. In the beginning it was via pagers - remember those little black boxes? Now it is via BlackBerry or text messaging. The trigger is not very reliable but we tend to react accordingly rather than be sorry later.

Yesterday when I was luxuriating at home in my shorts I received a CODE RED at room #136. All the rooms that start with #100 series are ocean-view rooms, hence the furthest away from the lobby and where I live. I hastily stepped into a pair of pants and ran out of the door while pulling an old T-shirt over my head. I couldn’t care less about my appearance should my hotel burn to the ground.

I ran through the back corridors and incredibly I did not run into one single staff. They must have all gone to #136 and it appeared the fire was legitimate, I thought. I sniffed the air as I ran along.

Strangely, when I arrived at #136, puffing and huffing (which reminded me that I should have gone to the gym instead of just wallowing in bed), there was no one there.

Acting quickly, I crouched down and gingerly touched the door with the back of my hand, as I had been taught - there was no heat from behind the door. I sniffed the air again - no smoke. What’s happening?

Just as I scratched my head while sitting on my haunches, a housekeeping staff emerged from the adjacent room. We locked eyes for a second and he gave me a big smile.

“Fire alarm?” asked he.

“You also got CODE RED?”

“Oh you are too late. It was yesterday. False alarm anyway,” he shrugged and walked away.

10 minutes later, I flopped back into bed as I could neither figure out why I received the CODE RED today, nor why I didn’t receive it yesterday.

I hate it when technology fails on such a simple task, especially when I look like a fool in front of my staff.

Today we said farewell to Hans, our Swiss pastry chef, at the end of his contract. Sadly, an expatriate pastry chef at a difficult time such as now is an overt luxury in the eyes of the owner. Daily operation will not suffer, as his main objective has been to train the local staff. Professionally he has been doing an OK job but I wouldn’t lose sleep over having to let him go.

In addition, Hans is quite a burden on our budget. Nearly all of us are on a single status. It is easier and cheaper to transfer singles in and out in terms of air tickets, visa, shipment of belongings, and the write-off of living expenses in the hotel. Hans was at the level of a department head and he had arrived with a wife and a baby girl. Apart from the money we had spent on him just to get him and his dependents into the country legally, he didn’t know that his health insurance premium was also the highest at our hotel. Not to mention that we have been paying three tickets for him and his family to return to Switzerland on their annual vacation.

Without doubt being expensive on the books is not Hans’ fault. He was hired to do a job and at the time he seemed to be the right man.

Hans lived with us in one of the apartments designated for expatriates near the parking lot. His wife, an Indian woman, did not socialize with us. She did not work or join any volunteer work as many other expat wives did. She was mainly taking care of the little daughter. Besides all the services that the hotel provided for live-in expats, she had a maid, a cook, and a driver on staff in her apartment. One of the reasons that Hans did not fight to extend his contract was that his wife found life here “too difficult” therefore they were willing to leave and return to Switzerland.

I sincerely wish Hans and his wife well back in the real world, where they will have to pay for accommodation and utility bills. When a fuse burns or a light bulb goes out, they can no longer just pick up the phone and summon Engineering to come and fix it. They will no longer be able to draft a list of groceries then march into the cold kitchen where everything is counted, weighed and packed for pick up - at no charge. There will be no housekeeper everyday at the door with fresh sheets and towels and to scrub their home clean. Gone will be the days when they stuff dirty laundry into a pillow case and fresh laundry appears miraculously the day after all starched, folded, and scented with lavender water.

Above all, I hope Hans’ wife will get used to a life without a maid, a cook and a driver at her disposal as I am pretty sure any of these jobs in Switzerland commands a salary as much as her husband can bring home. If life as an expat is “too difficult”, I dare not imagine what real life will be for her.

As for me, I know life as an expat is unreal. That’s why I look at this period as an adventure in Wonderland, because someday I will wake up and find myself having to make my own bed again.