Airport until Today
May. 7th, 2007 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nemo2342The ride to Denali took damn near forever. It was about 7 hours stuck on a tourbus with a driver who would not shut the hell up. I was in the very back of the bus, next to a guy named Charles who happened to be one of the main cooks at the employee housing area. He's done 5 seasons here, so he had quite a few tips to share with me and the couple in front of us. By the end of the drive the four of us were known as the Peanut Gallery, as we were constantly mocking the lame "tour" our driver was giving, and picking on some of our coworkers (we currently have a bet to see which ones will get fired after the first pay period).
The lodge itself is beautiful, but the employee housing was not quite as advertised. Many of us were lead to believe that the rooms had attached bathrooms, when in reality most rooms did not. The communal shower for my hall (38 rooms, 1-2 people per room) only has 4 shower stalls, 4 sinks, and 2 toilets. The public restroom on my floor is Out of Order, with no ETA as to when it will be fixed. This is fairly bad, since all the guys have to have neatly groomed facial hair (unless they're in food service, where they have to be clean shaven). Also, the "wifi" appears to only work in the rec room, and not in the bedrooms. I heard a rumor that this was being worked on, but we'll see.
My roomate is a gentleman by the name of Howard. He appears to be in his late 40s/early 50s, and he is morbidly obese (he's easily 350 lbs). My current priority is to get him moved to another room. He drank a fifth of gin from 9pm to 11pm, then promptly passed out on his bed and began snoring. I could deal with normal snoring, but his snores were extremely loud and obnoxious, not to mention the groaning, wheezing, and grunting. The only time he stopped snoring was when he stopped breathing altogether, and at times I wondered if he had finally choked to death in his sleep.
Needless to say, I only managed about an hour's worth of rest (I wouldn't call it sleep), and at 4am I said fuck it and got ready for work. From 4-5 I hung out in the rec room, using their computers to check up on a few things to kill time. At 5am I ran into another insomniac, and we hung out until we left for work at 7:30am.
Work itself was pretty boring. We started with the usual "go in a circle and say something about yourself" BS, then moved on to a half-assed customer service video in a building with no fucking heat. After that we had some generic hot pockets and soup for lunch, and then we had some job-specific training (except for me).
Here's the deal. I'm not an auditor in the transportation department, as I originally thought. Rather, I am THE auditor for the transportation department. I unlike the other Outfitters, I have my own office in a completely seperate building from the Front Desk. So before I get my specific training, I have to run through a lot of the general Outfitter training so that I can figure out how they've screwed up the books.
This reminds me very much of my last job, in fact. I'm not one of the supervisors, but I'm not one of the peons either. I'm pretty glad to not be in charge of anyone's work but my own, though I do have one supervisor across the hall from me who said I could help her with her work if I had spare time. I probably will, since 1)Princess seems to have no problems paying lots of overtime and 2)It makes it look better if I decide to come back next year. Plus I receive bonus pay (something like .30-.50/hr) at the end of the season, assuming I do a good job.
Despite the fact that I'm not working with the rest of the Outfitters, I still get all the benefits of being one. As a first year outfitter I have priority for any tours offered to the employees. Theoretically this is so that the outfitters, who are responsible for booking the various tours that go out from the lodge, will be knowledable and willing/able to push these (often pricey) trips on people. I've signed up for the first trip they've offered, which goes out tomorrow. I'm tired, and I really don't want to go, but I want to look like I'm a team player. One guy did refuse to go on this "strongly encouraged" outing, and I suspect that he's not going to make it through his contract.
Right now I'm exhausted, and starving. The line for dinner was humongous, so I'm sitting in the rec room on my laptop, catching up on my emails. Normally it wouldn't be this bad, since everyone wouldn't be in the homestead at the same time (the lodge has to be staffed in various ways 24/7), but right now we're all here since there's little point in staffing an empty hotel (except for the select few people who are there getting it ready for opening next week).
The lodge itself is beautiful, but the employee housing was not quite as advertised. Many of us were lead to believe that the rooms had attached bathrooms, when in reality most rooms did not. The communal shower for my hall (38 rooms, 1-2 people per room) only has 4 shower stalls, 4 sinks, and 2 toilets. The public restroom on my floor is Out of Order, with no ETA as to when it will be fixed. This is fairly bad, since all the guys have to have neatly groomed facial hair (unless they're in food service, where they have to be clean shaven). Also, the "wifi" appears to only work in the rec room, and not in the bedrooms. I heard a rumor that this was being worked on, but we'll see.
My roomate is a gentleman by the name of Howard. He appears to be in his late 40s/early 50s, and he is morbidly obese (he's easily 350 lbs). My current priority is to get him moved to another room. He drank a fifth of gin from 9pm to 11pm, then promptly passed out on his bed and began snoring. I could deal with normal snoring, but his snores were extremely loud and obnoxious, not to mention the groaning, wheezing, and grunting. The only time he stopped snoring was when he stopped breathing altogether, and at times I wondered if he had finally choked to death in his sleep.
Needless to say, I only managed about an hour's worth of rest (I wouldn't call it sleep), and at 4am I said fuck it and got ready for work. From 4-5 I hung out in the rec room, using their computers to check up on a few things to kill time. At 5am I ran into another insomniac, and we hung out until we left for work at 7:30am.
Work itself was pretty boring. We started with the usual "go in a circle and say something about yourself" BS, then moved on to a half-assed customer service video in a building with no fucking heat. After that we had some generic hot pockets and soup for lunch, and then we had some job-specific training (except for me).
Here's the deal. I'm not an auditor in the transportation department, as I originally thought. Rather, I am THE auditor for the transportation department. I unlike the other Outfitters, I have my own office in a completely seperate building from the Front Desk. So before I get my specific training, I have to run through a lot of the general Outfitter training so that I can figure out how they've screwed up the books.
This reminds me very much of my last job, in fact. I'm not one of the supervisors, but I'm not one of the peons either. I'm pretty glad to not be in charge of anyone's work but my own, though I do have one supervisor across the hall from me who said I could help her with her work if I had spare time. I probably will, since 1)Princess seems to have no problems paying lots of overtime and 2)It makes it look better if I decide to come back next year. Plus I receive bonus pay (something like .30-.50/hr) at the end of the season, assuming I do a good job.
Despite the fact that I'm not working with the rest of the Outfitters, I still get all the benefits of being one. As a first year outfitter I have priority for any tours offered to the employees. Theoretically this is so that the outfitters, who are responsible for booking the various tours that go out from the lodge, will be knowledable and willing/able to push these (often pricey) trips on people. I've signed up for the first trip they've offered, which goes out tomorrow. I'm tired, and I really don't want to go, but I want to look like I'm a team player. One guy did refuse to go on this "strongly encouraged" outing, and I suspect that he's not going to make it through his contract.
Right now I'm exhausted, and starving. The line for dinner was humongous, so I'm sitting in the rec room on my laptop, catching up on my emails. Normally it wouldn't be this bad, since everyone wouldn't be in the homestead at the same time (the lodge has to be staffed in various ways 24/7), but right now we're all here since there's little point in staffing an empty hotel (except for the select few people who are there getting it ready for opening next week).
