This was the last straw. As I stood there bleeding, I reflected over the past couple of days. I had flown to University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to attend the Robert S. Hartman Institute’s Annual Conference. My wife cashed in her own frequent flier miles to get me a $10 ticket and I paid $50 for the conference. Not bad.
The Inn where I stayed was another story. At nearly $100 a night, one would expect a certain level of elegance and comfort. The Internet gave it mixed reviews. The small Victorian bed and breakfast was a pleasant 15-minute walk from McClung Tower where the RSH Conference was held on the university campus. On arriving after midnight, the dimly-lit room looked like a haven. Much work has gone into decorating the B&B, but it’s not well maintained; as though the rather sloppy innkeeper’s late wife had been the inspiration behind its décor and now-waning charm.
The innkeeper, Buddy (not his real name), is a man who throws a few charming words and gracious gestures like a thin sheet over a living room pile of his lumpy frustrations and knobby discontent. The outcome is not a comfy couch. At my first breakfast, he popped into one of three dimly-lit eating areas where I was dishing up fruit and cereal, and kindly pointed out the several options and disappeared.
Soon I wandered into the next room looking for milk. I spotted a white pitcher that experience led me to believe would contain milk. I picked it up as Buddy poked his head out of a narrow dark hallway leading back to a cluttered kitchen where he cooks up his eggs-and-ham breakfast casserole.
“One percent or whole?” he asked.
“One percent,” I answered.
Then he spied the white pitcher in my hand, and said, “You gonna pour coffee on your cereal?”
“No” I said, “Do you have milk?”
“That’s why I said, ‘one percent or whole’,” he repeated rather testily. I quietly received the milk that he pulled from a fridge in the dark recesses of the kitchen. But I was thinking up clever comebacks which I never delivered.
With no shower curtain and a showerhead that tended to point wherever it’s fickleness willed, I found myself each morning on my knees sopping up all the water that had sprayed out on the bathroom floor. Rotting baseboards told me I wasn’t the first to face this problem, and it did cost me several minutes each morning.
Thursday night, the room was a bit chilly so as I climbed into bed, I turned on the heater. “Blehhhhhh!!” the smoke detector belted out with deafening volume. I jumped up, found the offended device and hit its reset button which mercifully worked. But the heater had already spewed out acrid smoke and I lay in bed breathing it as I tried to fall asleep. Later, I told Buddy, and he said, “It don't surprise me, the folks in room #1 did the same thing last night. Always happens in the Fall. All the dust in ‘em kinda burns up when they first come on.”
Friday night I was settling in early when I heard many fireworks. After a bit, curiosity overcame me and I decided to hurry out and see if I could catch the tail end of the show. Not bothering to pick up my key or put on my shoes, I left my room door ajar and padded down the hall to the front door which has a handwritten sign on the inside saying, “Do not lock the front door.” I left that door ajar also to be doubly sure, and I wandered out towards the street picking my way gingerly over the gravel parking lot.
The display was farther away than I thought. Over the Tennessee River, hundreds of fireworks were going off like one prolonged finale. As I admired many colorful explosions and thrilled to the heavy percussions, two women walked into the Inn and closed the door. No worries, everyone knows not to lock it.
At the end of the show, I picked my way back across the lot and tried the locked door. Did I say “locked”? This was bad news. I had no key. It was late and my cell phone was inside. Without shoes I didn’t relish the thought of creeping around the old building, stepping on brambles or slugs, peering into windows, and begging someone to open the front door. Instead, I hammered on the door with my fist. Time and again I pounded.
I was getting worried when one of the women reappeared and opened the door. “It says, ‘Don’t lock the door,’” she said.
“I didn’t,” I answered. “I don’t even know how to. Look, there’s no way to do it without the key.” We both examined the door and scratched our heads. She went back to bed. I got my room key, but that didn’t even fit the lock. The door was still locked though I was now on the happy side of it. However, I had gotten just worried enough on the porch that I didn’t want someone else to be stuck, so I called Buddy.
“That’s why I put that sign on the door that says, ‘Don’t lock the door.’” he chided.
“I didn’t lock the door,” I stated. “Well, somebody did,” he said disbelievingly. I sighed, “How can I unlock it so that the next guy doesn’t get caught?” I asked wanting to be done and back in bed.
“You could have just used the key that was under the front mat,” Buddy said not ready to end the scolding.
“Well, you know, the next guy might not know about the key under the front mat and really be stuck,” I said. “How do I fix it to stay unlocked?”
“Just push the button,” Buddy said with some agitation.
It took him awhile to understand that I had no idea to look at the end of the door right below the actual latch to find two little buttons like old-fashioned light switches. These buttons are, of course, covered when the door is closed. Push one, the latch is locked. Push the other, and the latch is unlocked. I was having a hard time picturing this, never having seen a door with mechanical on-and-off buttons on the skinny end of the door. I told him I’d look for them and try it.
He said, “Well, if you can’t figure it out, I’ll just have to drive down there and push the button myself.” Then he admitted that over time, one button tends to move out and the door locks itself.
The next morning, the yellowed-plastic cover to the light fixture in the toilet room fell on my hand, puncturing my skin before it clattered onto the tiles. “Ouch!” I said, trying to squeeze more blood out of the big muscle at the base of my thumb. As I sat recomposing myself after this unexpected sneak attack, I thought, “A real love for people would cause the innkeeper to fix up this place and to be truly, proactively interested in their comfort. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot truly be gracious in the middle of unaddressed decay.”
I reflected on what I’d been hearing in the conference. “When you approach people as having value in themselves, you deal with them in the richest manner possible. When you approach them as objects, you deal with them less richly.” So, here’s Buddy, running an Inn. He wants to be known as a gracious host, but he doesn’t care for his property or fix the many booby traps around the place. The message I get is, “Sonny wants paying customers, but people annoy him.”
If Buddy pours on the charm and gets more empathic, it will not alleviate the problem. People need to be safe before they need to be entertained or complimented. Taking good care of things often translates as taking good care of people.
Did I share that little gem with Buddy? No, I’m the quiet majority the customer service research warns about, “For every one customer who complains, 28 will be unhappy and not speak up, and 26 of those won’t come back.”
There was a lesson in this for me. Facility management is perhaps the least favorite of my tasks. I would rather enjoy happy people than fiddle with objects. But the only way I can actually honor people is to use objects to bless them. Short of that, I am actually using them as objects to bless me.
The ticket was real; the “contribution” angle was a fantasy and an exercise in diversionary creative writing. “Minding the gap” sometimes calls for a little “revisionist history”. The flashing lights initially generated a sinking feeling and the ticket turned my stomach. But once on the road again I faced the choice of how to view the event. I heeded the timely reminder to drive safely and there was nothing more to learn. I could not change the occurrence, but I could “redesign” it. So I created my own story about it; a disarming and harmless pastime.
