Luckily I Survived
Suddenly the lights flickered. Then they went out. Everything in my hotel room run by electricity stopped working. It was a rainy evening and pitch black outside…and now inside.
A minute later, the lights flickered back on. For a minute or two. And then, once again, darkness returned.
The pattern repeated for ten minutes or so. I looked out the window to see if this was happening only in my room, or in the entire hotel, or in the entire area. To my annoyance, in this relatively new and quite fancy hotel and in the surrounding area, all had power but me.
Then the lights came on and remained lit. I called the front desk, explained what was happening, and asked the clerk to send someone to see what was going on. He told me he’d send the engineer right over.
When the engineer arrived, he told me he’d checked the circuit breaker and it was working. And then he shared the history of the room.
Seems this mysterious electrical event had occurred before. Only in this room. A number of times. The engineers had checked everything they could and hadn’t been able to figure out the problem. Apparently to make me feel better he added that it hadn’t happened for several months.
And then he left.
Three minutes later the flickering light scenario unfolded once again. I was not happy.
This time my call to the front desk led to a young man showing up to help me move to another room.
Very early the next morning as I was checking out, I had a long conversation with the man at the desk. I shared my story and explained that I was surprised the hotel staff knew about the electrical problem and did nothing to solve it. What if my elderly mother was taking a shower when this happened, causing her to fall and whack her head? Or if it turned out that the problem was caused by something serious that led to a fire in the middle of the night that burned the place down while it was fully booked?
To my amazement, he told me that he’d been there ten years, since they opened, and had never heard about this before. I was flabbergasted. We chatted about it further as he made copious notes. He was clearly quite upset by how the incident was initially handled in my case, and by the fact that this had happened a number of times and no one had ever told him about it. And that they kept renting the room. He told me that as soon as I left he was going to begin investigating and figure out how to fix the problem.
How many failures of management are encapsulated in this story? Start with a culture where employees don’t think this is a problem worth sharing with their bosses…and keep renting the room without thinking about the potential consequences.
Think about your company. Do you have a flickering light problem that no one’s shared with you?