Journals of a Hotel Manager

For more than three hours, we managed to ship out all our guests in the laundry trolleys. When the head count was tallied, we had to search high and low for an elderly English gentleman who had serenely fallen asleep on a chaise in the garden. We firmly refused his request to stay another night at our hotel.

Once again, most guests thanked us for our response to this disaster and appreciated that all the staff had not taken a break or had lunch. A few people threatened to write to our head office for the inconvenience. A couple of ladies frowned at getting into the increasingly wet and greasy laundry trolleys. The men who refused to take their own computer bags complained about the fact that their luggage might get dirty. A senior director who happened to visit us from the headquarters offered no help but instead he pulled me aside to ask to be housed in the best hotel in the city and to be shipped out in the first laundry trolley.

Night fell over the darkened street. Electricity was still not restored. Female staff and a couple of wives were the last one to get into the laundry trolley. They spent the night across the street in a local hotel. The men remained behind to guard the building. We were not about to leave the doors open for looters. Pillows and blankets were brought down from the guest rooms. Nearly a hundred of male staff slept in the lobby together with the GM and me. All we had were a handful of flashlights and some aromatic candles from the spa through the night.

It had been a long day but it was difficult to fall asleep. We were all very hungry. We each had a ration of biscuits (bakers never got the chance to bake for the day) and left over fruits from the guests as the kerosene burner ran out of fuel. Many questions remained: Would the flood subside? When would the hotel reopen? Would we still have a job tomorrow?

In the middle of the night, the rain returned and it only added to our dread. It was the commencement of the most difficult year of my entire career, and probably of my entire adult life.