Chapter 6
It was thorough. It involved a structured review of the front desk team, a retraining protocol he had already been drafting for another reason and would now accelerate, and a change to the internal review process that would route flagged guest interactions to him directly rather than through the desk supervisors who had, until now, been self-reporting. He had clearly been up since before six. The outline of it was already on his phone.
I listened to all of it. "That's the right direction," I said. "I want a report in thirty days. Not a summary. The actual data, the actual conversations, the actual changes. I want to see whether it held."
"Yes, sir."
"And Lupita."
"I spoke to her this morning," he said. "She was surprised. She's been interested in guest relations training for two years, apparently. Applied internally once and was told the timing wasn't right."
"Fix the timing."
"Already done."
I looked at the lake. Lily was still sleeping in the next room, the deep sleep of a child who has caught up to all the hours the previous day borrowed. The roses were on the dresser. Outside, Chicago was doing its November thing, gray and cold and completely certain of itself, the way cities are when they have been standing long enough to stop caring whether you find them impressive.
"Marcus," I said.
"Sir."
"The things that went wrong last night were specific and correctable. What Lupita did was also specific. Make sure the staff understands the difference between those two things."
He nodded.
"And send a note to Patricia and Karla's files," I said. "Not a termination. A documented formal warning with a ninety-day review. If the behavior changes, it changes. If it doesn't, that's a different conversation."
May you like
He wrote it down.
I had built seven hotels. I had built them with the belief that hospitality was not a service industry in the way that term was usually meant, which was transactional, a unit of comfort exchanged for a unit of money. I had built them believing it was something closer to what Lupita had done the previous evening, which was to notice that something was wrong and to involve yourself even when it was not strictly your department, even when a colleague told you to stay in your lane, because a tired man was holding a sleeping child and a bunch of battered roses and something about it required a response that the people who were supposed to provide it were not providing.
