Falling with Style
When I worked at the hotel, we would occasionally have guests who confused “customer service” with “servant.” There were quite a few who make for good stories, but one really took the cake. His name was Pat. Pat broke so many rules of good taste and decency dealing with the people at our facility, down to pretending to be someone at his meeting planner’s school when his meeting planner wasn’t taking calls (she was in a meeting with other customers – God forbid she help other people, so he pretended to be with the school in order to panic her enough to come out of the meeting and take his call).
It got to the point that many of us wanted to march into our General Manager’s office and demand he get involved or tell Pat’s organization they wouldn’t be permitted to meet at our facility based on his conduct. Of course, that didn’t happen, and in the name of the almighty dollar, Pat’s group came to the facility.
Dealing with Pat was one of the few times I played my seniority card and had standard technicians deal with the guest, monitoring what was going on from our office – out of sight of Pat’s bonehead ways. I wasn’t the only one who took this approach. My boss acted in a similar manner. Essentially it was one of the rarities where the low man on the totem pole got stuck with the bad job. Most of the time both myself and my boss were willing to step up and do everything, but we both knew Pat might push us beyond the limitations of sanity. It didn’t matter. Nothing we did was good enough for Pat, and we knew just about everyone he came into contact with was going to be reported to our General Manager in some fashion. We also knew better than to trust our General Manager would support his staff (surprisingly, he did, but that’s another matter).
After day one of dealing with Pat on property, I stopped at a music store on the way home and picked up a CD: Denis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer. The album has Leary’s infamous song, “I’m an Asshole” as the opening track. I figured, if I was going to get fired (or quit out of frustration), the last thing I’d do would be to patch a CD player into the meeting room’s sound (you could do that from the safety of our office), announce via microphone that this one was dedicated to Pat, and put the track on repeat before walking out of the building. Sounds like a pretty cool way to quit a job, eh?
Obviously I didn’t do it. I survived Pat and many other jerks, eventually getting promoted and moving up the corporate ladder a little bit. But that encounter was an eye-opening event that showed me just how little I was worth to some of our customers, as well as to the company I worked for. Companies are driven by money, and I was fooling myself if my job meant anything more than serving as a person who earned a considerable amount of money for that location. It’s probably the first step I took toward complete job dissatisfaction, and part of the reason I eventually left to become an educator.
Why do I bring this story up? Because, to this day, I still think it would have been a cool way to quit a job. Falling with style, if you will. Voicing my dissidence to an entire audience, and letting Pat’s people know exactly what we thought of him…
… and now I have complete control over my school’s football field video display system.
Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it? 