I'm smarter than my boss. She knows it and I know it. And it's not that I can't respect someone who's not as smart as me. Really, it's not. Especially if you consider that lesser intelligence in the context of more experience in this industry than I have. I consider that experience something I can learn from. After all, don't we all have new things we can learn? Of course we do. I love knowledge. The day I stop learning is the day I die. The problem is, she does not feel that way.
Each day, the morning shift at a hotel blocks guests into rooms. What this means is that we select a room for a guest based on their requests. Connecting rooms, high floor, first floor, quiet area, smoking (not permitted, so they go near an exit). We go through and block accordingly, based on that day's arrivals. However, for some reason our system was doing something very unfortunate in that it was automatically blocking rooms with no consideration to guest preferences. So my supervisor comes out one morning and asks if we are blocking according to requests. I say, yes, we are, and she asks why the rooms guests are currently in don't match their requests. Wellll, that would be because the system blocks automatically and I haven't gone through to fix it yet.
"What do you mean the system blocks automatically? That doesn't make any sense. Someone had to set that up."
I pull up the screen to show her, unblocking several rooms and showing her how the system automatically reblocks. Which she ignores
"That doesn't make any sense. The system doesn't do that."
She goes back into the office, and I ask my coworker what exactly there is to not understand. This isn't brain surgery. Her response: she doesn't want to understand.
I received similar responses from both my parents - apparently I am showing up my supervisor with my superior knowledge of the system, and she doesn't like it. But anyway, I go to the help for our system and figure out how to stop the automatic blocking. Then I tell the GM that I've stopped it. He lets my immediate supervisor know this, and she tells him that the morning shift haven't been responding to requests when rooms are blocked, and that's the problem with the blocking, nothing else.
I heard about this because someone else was in the back office at the time - I didn't hear it directly. And at first I shrugged it off, but the more I think about it, the more pissed off I am. How dare she tell my GM a flat-out lie about me, especially after I explained the problem to her and she decided she didn't want to understand? So I've decided to talk to him tomorrow. And I don't care if it makes her look bad. I'm not going to be here that much longer anyway!
***PS - I know I haven't been posting much lately. Nothing happened at work to make me feel this way, but I become paranoid about being caught. Fellow bloggers, how do you manage to stay anonymous and still tell specific stories about your job?
I love this post. At my job, we have a problem with ants that crowd around one particular table. Just one. We've tried to tell them to stop spraying and put this ant poison stuff down instead, but they continue to spray about twice a week! And it's still not working. I could give more examples, but I'll spare you. But, I think I understand how you feel. You're good at your job, and while you're not particularly trying to upstage this person, you just want people to know that you know what you're doing. You're smart enough to handle the job given.
ReplyDeleteAs far as remaining anonymous...it is difficult. I had a Facebook thing blow up in my face earlier this year, but I don't really worry too much about my blog. I guess you could say that I like to live dangerously...or maybe I'm just being silly, but blogging in a way for me to relieve stress, so who are they to take that from me? What I write isn't keeping people from eating in my restaurant, and I'm sure that the things that you write about the hotel aren't stopping people from booking rooms...
I agree with what aneducatedserver said. I doubt what you say here will hurt business.
ReplyDeleteAs far as my own blog, I don't have many readers, and there are no employment rules preventing me from telling work stories. Not that it would stop me anyway.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI just came across your blog and enjoyed it very much. I'm a banquet manager and write a blog about the daily aggravations that go with my job...from cranky chefs to nasty customers and everything in between.
It's nice to finally find another blog from someone else in the hotel business. Good luck.
So You Want To Be a Banquet Manager