The Front Desk
“Before we begin,” I said into the microphone, “I’d like to read you a sentence from our staff handbook. It’s on page one. I wrote it in 1994, in a hotel in Honolulu, on a legal pad, because nobody had said it to me when I started.”
A hundred and forty guests stood on the oceanfront lawn holding mai tais and plumeria leis. The breeze moved the palms. Near the front, a woman in a white linen dress had gone the color of the napkins.
“‘The person who carries your bag is the person who decides how your stay begins. Treat her accordingly.’”
I let that sit. Behind the crowd, the sun was dropping toward the water like a coin into a slot.
“My name is Lorraine Aoki-Brandt. For nineteen months, I’ve been the managing director of Seawind Bluff Resort. For fifty-one years, before that, I was a housekeeper, a bellhop, a night auditor, a front-desk clerk, and a lot of other things that don’t fit on a business card. As of this afternoon, I’d like you all to know that I’m also the woman who was told to carry some luggage.”
Somebody gasped. Somebody laughed, a short startled bark. At the front, Trudy Burchett’s mouth had opened and not closed.
I should say who I am, because for nineteen months, the only people on this island who knew were the ones who signed my checks.
I was born in 1955 in Wahiawa, on Oahu, the daughter of a pineapple-cannery foreman and a seamstress. At seventeen, I took a job cleaning rooms at the Ilikai in Waikiki for $2.10 an hour. I learned to fold a fitted sheet in eleven seconds. I learned that guests leave their real selves in the bathroom, and that the best managers in any hotel are the ones who’ve scrubbed the tubs.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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