Concierge Confidential (26 page)

Service naturals are easy to overlook because they might not be the most gregarious, smiley, bubbly people—but neither is a really great stockbroker. I generally try to look for people who are not engaging, but who look focused. They're not
un
friendly. I was never unfriendly at my job, but I was much more focused on what people really wanted than on chitchat about how they were doing this fine spring morning.

We're instinctively drawn to people who are cute, young, and bubbly. Yet those people are usually just passing through the service world. They often don't have real power or anything invested. I always look for the oldest, least glamorous person. They might not be nice, but they rule the roost—and they don't usually get any validation, so you'll get a lot more mileage.

Here's an easy way to tell the difference: Per Se is a quiet restaurant, and Applebee's is loud. When I ate at Per Se, they weren't really that receptive to when I tried to be chummy and fun—but they weren't cold, either. “That's very funny,” they said, “but how's your meal?” Meanwhile, if you went to Applebee's, you'd have a very different experience. The service is boisterous. They tell you where they're from. Everything about it is
screaming
about what a fun place it is to be. Where would you like me to make your reservation?

15.

Bands of Gold

Everything Abbie and I did was operating under the hotel mentality. But when we reached out to our hotel connections for new hires, we weren't looked upon too kindly. We were wild cards. Whether it was jealousy or whether they were upholding the credo of conciergedom, people were expecting us to come crawling back to the hotel fold. They didn't want us in the associations; they didn't want us accredited by Clefs d'Or. Concierge meant hotel, period.

We managed to find a girl named Missy who had worked at a hotel spa. She was an itsy-bitsy girl with a little chipmunk voice who reminded me of an Olympic gymnast. Missy was somewhat nice, but somewhat uncooperative as well.

I was in the “office” with her one day when a tenant came down with some dry cleaning. “Here,” Missy said, handing him a bag. “Can you put your clothes in there for me?”

The man looked at her sideways, but did as she asked and didn't say anything.

I waited until he left. “What was that?” I asked her. “That's not very customer service–focused. You can just take his clothes and bag them yourself.”

“I can't touch his gross clothing,” she said. “That's disgusting!”

“Missy, these are fancy people. It's not like he was handing you his dirty underwear. Those were dress shirts and a Canali suit.”

“Well,” she said, crossing her arms, “I'm not comfortable doing that. Would it be all right with you if we compromised?”

“Sure,” I said. “What's the compromise?”

“I'll do it if you let me wear sanitary gloves.”

“Fine. But you're paying for the gloves.”

She left the company not too long after that. To be fair, it was an environment that demanded a very specific type of personality. If you didn't own our supply closet/office, it could have felt pretty repressive. There was no window, and the air got full of the Clean Crisp White Votivo candle scent. I loved my lilies, but I also changed the water every day. If I left for two or three days, the vase would stink rancidly. The whole ambience backfired because it took maintenance, and other people didn't maintain it.

We decided to try to expand our search from just the hotel world. “Let's just put it out in the
Village Voice,
” I suggested, “and get some young, collegey kids.” Our ad emphasized the hospitality aspect—and we got people who were really only tangentially from the hospitality field, like former employees of YMCAs in the Bronx. We booked four hours' worth of interviews at the W Union Square, and we had every conceivable type of person come through the door. It was like
American Idol
. The good ones we did get ran in the other direction when they saw our little closet workspace. We tried a couple of people, but they didn't work out because they weren't scrappy enough.

The next time around we just knew we had to keep it real. In a way, it had been just as difficult to explain what we did to a potential employee as it had been to explain it to a potential client. It was innovative and people were confused; a concierge without a hotel was like an astronaut without a spaceship. We just took all the sex appeal out of the job description in our next ad:
You take dry cleaning. You book housekeeping. You walk people's dogs.

That's how we found Teddy. Teddy was super-effeminate, with a voice that was higher pitched than any soprano I had ever heard. He spoke faster than speed-readers go through books, to the point where you couldn't even follow him sometimes. If somebody told him that they wanted their apartment cleaned, his response was frantically long winded. “Oh, it's no problem. Is it a one-bedroom or a two-bedroom or a three-bedroom? Do you want coffee started or should we just do the bathroom and the kitchen? Would you like to go out for dinner? Because you know we also book car service for you.” But he had such a spirit that I thought he was going to be
great
.

One day Teddy screwed something up with dry cleaning. But he was also smart and very industrious, so he discovered that another tenant had picked up the clothing by mistake. By tracing the receipts, he knew that Mrs. Yates had Mr. Fishbach's clothes. Unfortunately, Mrs. Yates was a miserable and confrontational person. Innocently, he called her up to get the matter straightened out. “I think I messed up,” he told her, “and I think that we gave you Mr. Fishbach's cleaning.”

Instead of taking the information and checking her closet, she put Teddy through the ringer. “Well,
why
do you think so? Is this how you deal with people's personal belongings? Don't you have a
system
?”

He got off the phone with her and told me the whole scenario. Shades of Lucinda Oskar flashed in my head. “Don't worry about Mrs. Yates. Let's just write a check to Mr. Fishbach and make this thing go away.”

“But I feel so guilty!” he said.

I cut him off before he went on a monologue. “It's just a growing pain. These things are inevitable as we get busier and busier. Just find out exactly what Mr. Fishbach is missing and we'll pay him.”

A couple of days later Teddy pulled me aside, ecstatic. “I got Mr. Fishbach's clothes back! I
knew
that Mrs. Yates had it.”

“That's great! Did she finally bring it down?”

“No, I just went in and took it.”

It was like time froze. “Hold on. Let me get this straight. So you went into her apartment
with
her?”

“No. You know that I've got really good relationships with a lot of people in the building, so I went to the doorman and asked for the key to Mrs. Yates's apartment because I was
convinced
that she had the cleaning. So I went into her place while she wasn't home. Sure enough, there were the clothes, still wrapped in plastic and everything.”

It always took a second to process what Teddy was saying, but this took me more than a second. He had just admitted to me that he was guilty of breaking and entering in the name of Abigail Michaels. Or, at the very least, guilty of
entering
.

The sick part of me was glad that that miserable woman was busted. But the smart, business part of me realized that Teddy had just robbed her house. I wanted to go back and work at a hotel and never have to deal with people ever again. “You can't do that, Teddy,” I told him calmly. “It's not worth it. This is going to be a huge problem. That was
not
the right thing to do.”

Teddy had created this huge liability for us. If Mrs. Yates noticed that the clothes were gone, we'd be gone from the building as well. People like that
enjoy
causing trouble, as I had witnessed over and over at the hotel. I knew that I had to confront the situation and call her, because it wasn't going to go away.

“Hi,” I told Mrs. Yates, acting calm but inwardly rattled. “You know, we have a bit of an issue. We've been looking for these misplaced items of clothing, and it seems that my employee got a little overly ambitious. He was so happy to have solved the mystery of where they ended up. His enthusiasm got the best of him, and he went to your apartment and took the clothes back. I just want to make sure you know that nothing happened. Nothing got broken and everything's okay.”

She wasn't mean and she didn't yell at me. Instead, Mrs. Yates just treated me like the biggest idiotic piece of crap imaginable. “Okay, okay, okay. Let me just understand this. You're calling me to tell me that your employee broke into my apartment and went through my things?”

“No…”

“How is that incorrect?”

“He didn't ‘go through your things.' ” But the fact of the matter was, she wasn't incorrect. The fact was, we
had
robbed her that day—but since the clothing didn't belong to her in the first place, we didn't
really
rob her. We'd
un
robbed Mr. Fishbach.

Calmly—and evilly—she said, “I need to talk to somebody about this first, before I can even reply to you.” That was terrifying, because I knew that her “somebody” meant that she was going to talk to a lawyer.

The next day I got a call from property management. I had told them what Teddy had done, but assured them I was going to take care of it. “Well, it's getting more complicated,” they said. “She claims that she had something around $15,000 in cash and she can't find it now. She kept it stashed in her closet, like in a secret coat.”

Now I needed my own “somebody,” and that
definitely
meant a lawyer. It turned out that if you're in possession of property that isn't yours, you're still culpable in the eyes of the law—and she
had
signed for the clothes.

Emboldened, I called her back. “Yeah,” I said, “you totally have me here. But let's just be realistic. Look at what you did. I don't know if you were doing it out of spite, or if it was oversight, or if you were feeling like you needed to teach us a lesson for making an honest mistake. Whatever the case was, you were holding on to things that didn't belong to you—and you
knew
they didn't belong to you. They had Mr. Fishbach's name on them!”

She paused, letting what I had said sink in. “Well, what are you offering?”

“If you sign an agreement that you understand that you took possession of these clothes, and that this is the remedy for the mistake, then I am prepared to compensate you.”

“How much?”

“Two thousand dollars.”

“Twenty-five hundred,” she said.

“Done.” I lost some money. But, sadly, I had to lose Teddy as well. I was starting to wonder if Abbie and I would find
anyone
who would be as much in sync with us as we were with one another.

That's when we reconnected with Daria.

Daria had been a concierge at the RIHGA since before it first opened. It was originally going to be launched by Scandinavian Airlines, but they lost money and so they sold it to the Japanese. It wasn't like me at the InterContinental, where it was a chain. They were basically the only hotel run by Royal International Hotel Group Associates.

It was a beautiful building—the only all-suite property and the tallest hotel in New York. But nobody knew who they were. They would literally accost people on the street and ask them to come take a tour of the amenities. Then they got the idea to approach the celebrity market and become a go-to place for movie junkets. They had a whole floor dedicated with the right lighting for celebrities to come and do interviews for places like
Entertainment Tonight
. Even if the celebs were living in New York at the time, they still came to the RIHGA to film their interviews.

They then branched out from junkets into the music industry. Daria jokingly called the RIHGA the Has-Been Hotel, because of all the old-time stars who stayed there when they were performing in New York. Take the Bee Gees, for example. They all had to have fully stocked bars with very specific drink requirements, which is not that uncommon or even remotely unreasonable. What I found hilarious was the fact that Barry Gibb had to have a whole huge process to make sure that his hair was perfect each and every time. The hotel staff got so sick of renting full-length mirrors for him that they just bought some and kept them in the back for when he returned. The dehumidifiers in the room were a must as well. He couldn't very well blow-dry his hair and then have it collapse before he even stepped out of the door.

Even though the RIHGA was a five-hundred-suite hotel, there were only thirteen rooms on each floor. It was a tall building, but it was still somewhat intimate. It wasn't like at the InterContinental, with our huge lavish lobby. Their lobby was
tiny
. They had four club chairs in the lobby: two on one side, two on the other—and that was
it
. It added to that semi-secluded vibe that they were going for.

HOTEL LOBBIES

If you're looking for a place to sit with your friend and chat, most people think of Starbucks, since they're so omnipresent. But in big cities, hotels are just as common. The locals don't even register that they're there, or ever think of stepping foot inside. Why would you go to a hotel if you aren't a tourist or there on business?

Hotel lobbies are designed to represent the establishment at its best. The seats are much better than at a Starbucks, the ambience more appealing, and there won't be people hovering over you to finish your coffee so they can take your chair. You won't be the only one “squatting,” either. Lobby lizards are a common issue with hotels, where not-so-fancy people come in off the street to read their paper and eat their Egg McMuffin. The hotels are loathe to shoo anyone out, for obvious reasons. Some hotels are even experimenting with having the lobby off the ground floor just to discourage walk-ins. But if you carry yourself with class and don't take up space, I guarantee that no one will bother you.