So let me preface this post by telling the story of a guy I used to work with, at a previous job. He was not my boss, but in fact my boss’s boss (‘s boss?). I forget exactly how high up he was, but enough that he had 100-200 people that ended up reporting to him.
This guy was a STICKLER for timesheets. More so than anyone I’ve ever worked with, before or since. Timesheets for the previous week were due at 9 a.m. on Monday morning and if you didn’t have them done, you got a nastygram. If you were a manager (I wasn’t), if all of your people didn’t have your timesheets in, then you got the same nastygram.
Frankly, it was pretty annoying, and I never understood it, until one day I heard his philosophy.
If I can’t count on you to take care of the little things, how can I count on you for the important things?
A timesheet takes 2 minutes (if that) to finish, and you KNOW that they’re due Monday at 9 a.m. EVERY week. So just get it done!
Applying it to hotels
I stayed last week at the Hyatt House Salt Lake City Airport. I was there for a work conference and was staying up on the 4th floor. Thursday morning, as I went down to breakfast, I took the stairs, and at the stairwell door, I saw the following sign:
No big deal, until I got down to the ground and saw that this was in fact the WEST stairway (it said so with a big sign at the bottom of the stairwell). Come to find out that they had switched the notification signs only on the 4th floor. All the other floors were correct (yes, I checked, because I’m that guy…)
I let the front desk know about the problem and the lady there was apologetic and said that they would let the maintenance man know. But 2 days later, when I checked out, on my way to the Family Travel for Real Life conference, it was still wrong. Maybe that was an unrealistic expectation, but it didn’t seem like that hard of a fix to make.
Similar issue at the Hyatt House San Juan
I had a similar issue at the Hyatt House San Juan, when we stayed there in Puerto Rico.
(SEE ALSO: San Juan expenses: How much did my “free” trip cost?)
(SEE ALSO: Old San Juan Puerto Rico – a review)
At that Hyatt House, the clock on the wall in the exercise room was stopped – I assume that it needed a battery replaced.
The stopped clock that nobody would fix
Big deal? Totally not! I had a cell phone and plus, I was on vacation so I wasn’t in a hurry anyway! But to me it’s the same exact thing! I reported it to the front desk, and 2 days later (before checking out) I went back and the clock was still stopped!
I don’t necessarily expect someone to monitor every clock in the hotel for stopped batteries, but after being alerted to the problem, if they don’t take the 30 seconds it would take to get a new AA battery out and replace it in the clock, then it makes me wonder what else there is? What other things are they not doing?
The rest of my stay at the Hyatt House Salt Lake City Airport
Like I said, the stairwell thing wasn’t a big deal and it certainly didn’t impact my stay. I was only there pretty much to sleep as I was at the conference until late both nights. The first night I got there late after finishing up visiting every county in Utah. Thursday morning, I dropped my rental car off at the nearby airport, then took the TRAX light rail into downtown. That was $2.50, which certainly compared favorably to the $23 cab ride I took on Friday morning :-(.
Anyways – I don’t know if I am alone in feeling this way about the little things? Am I feeling too spoiled / entitled? Let me know in the comments!
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Nope. Not too picky. I feel the same way. I don’t expect everyone to be perfect but I do expect a business to fix things when I point them out.
Exactly! The fact that the clock was stopped (or the signs were switched) was completely no big deal and didn’t take away from anything. It was the fact that 2 days later, they were STILL wrong that rubbed me the wrong way
You can take care of the big things if you consider them important regardless. All sorts of research of human behaviour suggests that we only have a limited number of things we can pay attention to in any one day so asking to do every little detail right distracts from the bigger picture.
Not necessarily too picky, but unrealistic expectations about fixing. You state that the sign “certainly didn’t impact (your) stay”. Almost certainly nobody else’s, either. Did you find out how many things that DID impact guests’ stays were on the Maintenance Department’s list? Or whether the staffing was impacted by illness or vacation? Two days seems a pretty high expectation for a “no impact” item. (Were the signs affixed to the wall with adhesive so that the fix would include plastering and painting as well?)
Yeah that’s a good point. I guess I was more disappointed about the batteries in the clock since that DID seem like it was fixable with minimal effort