Yes, I’ve spent the last three days working as a GSA (that’s a guest services agent-for those of you who need a new acronym for your vocabulary)– 7-8 hours shifts a day and it’s a real change.

The Old Faithful Inn was built in 1903 by Richard Reimer, the father of “parkitecture”  (the art of designing buildings to match the natural surroundings).  The Inn has 3 different sections and we have to know more than 14 different rooms types.  The rooms vary from $99/night–with a bathroom down the hall; to a $600 suite that looks like it’s in a mid-grade holiday inn–but the environment makes it all worth while.

So, with that said, what do I do?  I check guests in and out of the hotel….and right now we’re running about 30% foreign visitors.  What have I done so far?  Hmmm…today I managed to neglect to check a woman out of her room–so housekeeping didn’t get it cleaned until 2; I managed to not type the decimal point in a charge bill and charged a guest $3,624.00 for two nights instead of $362.40 and managed to miscount my cash drawer (because of a faulty calculator) and initially thought I was $50 short.  None of these seem like crisis–but, in this management structure–you don’t get a lot of mistakes….and right now I feel like a complete idiot.  The computer system is is copyrighted 1984 (an ominous date) and the idea of help menus are non-existent.  You MUST call a senior manager (someone who’s probably about 25) if there is any unusual circumstance at all; you are not allowed to problem solve and knowledge of how to fix common issues is reserved for seniors.

All the FLSA training makes sense–heaven help you if you clock in after only a 29 minute lunch..and you can’t clock in more than 5 minutes before your shift starts.

With all this said–the people make it all a wonderful adventure..but they are an extremely divergent crew.  One of my fellow GSAs referred to us as characters in The Island of Dr. Moreau–but I prefer to think of it as America in microcosm.  Who are the players?  A petite english major with a tendency towards goth and a penchant for anime; a bumbly nice kid from the southwest; two divorced women; one older, one younger; both looking for new directions in their lives; a wanabe author who has all the makings of becoming the Erma Bombeck of Yellowstone (I laugh whenever I read her blog); a mid-40 gentleman from a gambling town; a Floridian who experienced his first real snow-fall; and a few other assorted characters to fill in the gaps.  Somehow this motley crew is becoming a team; supporting each other when they make mistakes; buffering us from angry guests who are missing shower curtains (how do you not notice that until the morning you’re checking out?) and, in general, planning ways to make the long hours behind the desk go shorter.

The managers work really hard to insure that everyone had 2 days in a row off (“your weekend”) and usually the day before your weekend is an early shift so you are off by 2:30 and the day following your weekend is a late shift..so you can recuperate from whatever adventure you had.

We have our first weekend starting on Wednesday–so we’ll see how it works–but it’s being preceded by a night shift–I get off at 10:45 this evening!