The 5 harsh realities of living by yourself

I thought it was time I posted something based in reality and share some truth. This week was my first week as a fully fledged employee and it got me thinking what the hell fledged means and how you can only be half fledged. So I looked it up.

fledged

   [flejd]  Show IPA

adjective

1.

having the plumage or feathers necessary for flight.

2.

having the characteristics of maturity.

Generally I am an all rainbows kind of guy. Perpetual optimism is my thing but I have taken a few knocks this week and this post is my attempt to shake them off.

The 5 Harsh Truths of Living in NYC

5. The Loneliness.

The Truth: 
Moving to New York City by myself will always be one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. I think I have proved to myself that I have the stamina to face the world and invite it to a tea party and have scones with it. Somewhere loneliness is supposed to equate to sadness but that isn't how I have experienced it at all. For me, loneliness, is frustrating. It grows in me like a shallow rage that the things I'm seeing and the experiences I am having aren't being shared with anybody. My memories are solo ones and not having another person who can relay the stories makes them seem half as valuable.

Life loves scones.

The Twist:
Being on your own magnifies learning situations. There is no distraction from the fact that you just witnessed or learnt something spectacular. If sharing experiences adds more text to your book of life, being alone adds more books. It is great that I am growng this pool of knowledge that is wholly my own to draw from. It adds depth and magnitude and gives you confidence in your own decisions. It also frees you from explaining your decisions all of the time. It is a fantastic feeling to know that I have control over all of my time for a while.

4. The Competitiveness.

The Truth:
When the agency that helped me secure my visa also included a booklet on how to prepare for the competitiveness of the American job market I took it with a pinch of salt. I mean it is competitive everywhere and everybody is trying to get ahead. The big difference is the levels I have seen it be taken too and the general acceptance that if you ruin somebody in the process they had it coming. There doesn't seem to be a bigger picture in this company like there is in others I have worked in. I help people out whenever I can and I am thankful for the people that have helped me along the way. When it comes down to your reputation and your career you have to concentrate on yourself .

The Twist:
If you know me well enough you know exactly what is coming next. BRING IT ON MOFO. I haven't been writing about being able to pick yourself up because I am optimistic and don't know how hard it is. I do know how hard it is but it is the only option if you want to be successful. It teaches you to persevere and push and smile while you doing it. If it is a dog eat dog world I am a chihuahua that has learnt to use a knife and fork and I will smother you in delicious gravy. MMMMMMM gravy.

The gravy will be hot and it will burn you.

3. The Fear of Deportation.


I am on a J1 exchange visa and cannot work for any other company than the one I am working with now. Therefore if I don't work for this company I don't have a visa and will get my well formed behind catapulted back home. It is pretty terrifying to think that the only thing keeping me from being packed in a box of shame and embarrassment and shipped home is my ability to not screw up. I really have no idea how I would handle having to return home before my year is up because I made a mistake that got me fired. The idea of letting myself down like makes me wince.

This is what my farewell party will look like. 

The Twist. 
I have a very real and present motivation that few others have. While my colleagues are working to improve their lives and try get a promotion I am working to stay in the frikken country. Every time I get crabby or want to go home I get a snort of stop being retarded powder and count the blessing that I made it this far and will make it so much further. I think my smile and preppy attitude are beginning to piss some of my colleagues off but they don't realize that I do actually want to be at work everyday.

2. Budgeting.


The Truth.
I used to control my finances the same way a baby flies a plane - badly. I would get paid and then have a race with myself to see how fast and stupidly I could spend it and I would usually win. I was such a winner. I have no regrets as my lack of foresight allowed me to enjoy the last couple of years in a whimsical fun search where the only commitment was my daily dose of "Hell yea" . But that hedonistic ship has sailed and it is time to ride on the more responsible tugboat of early adulthood and it sucks. Instead of beautiful nights wining and dining at fantastic restaurants I now spend money on toilet paper and shampoo and it makes me cry inside.

The Twist.
I was having a discussion with a friend on when he first felt like an adult and he said it was the first time he withdrew cash from an ATM and felt poorer instead of richer. Ain't that the truth. It boils down to simple responsibility and being an adult is sacrificing the things you want to do for the things you need to do, isn't it? Well whatever it is, I am being forced to learn it and will only be better off in the long run.

1. Knowing that life goes on without you.

The Truth. 
It is amazing how in contact a person can be nowadays. Through facebook, Skype, my mobile phone I speak to people back home on a daily basis. It is really awesome and I can only imagine how hard it must have been for the kids who did this same transition back in the dark ages of the 1980's and yonder. The one thing about moving that does make me sad is that I am no longer apart of so many peoples lives. When I hear about the things that have happened I can't help but feel like I missed out on something. I love being apart of other peoples stories when they relay them at dinner parties and at the moment I am not in very many.

The Twist.
You only want the things you can't have and it would be very short sighted of me to deny myself the beauty of the whole experience by focusing on what I am missing. After all it is only for a year and then I will be back home pining to return to New York City where the lights will inspire me and the streets will make me feel brand new. I stole that last line fro Alicia Keys and Jay Z, so if you are reading this then sorry . Overall I am learning what it means to be a self sufficient adult. I am incredibly happy and am loving every second of it. Sometimes I get homesick but then I remember how many of my friends would kick me in the shin for this opportunity and that makes me smile. 

Just woke up and saw this on my friends feed.

I will remember this next time a guest is giving me hell. 

The scarf method of sustaining relationships.

Damn it, I feel like Oprah right now!

Back in the good old days of two months ago I had a life coach who was guiding me through the massive changes I was making to my life at that point. The very last lesson she taught me was a method of sustaining professional relationships known simply as SCARF. This may come across as a new age self help diatribe but the intention is pure, I promise you. I think that any new method can only add to your skill set, take what you need from it, and leave the rest to the hippies.

The  SCARF approach is a form of relationship review that enables you to see the ways you may or may not be contributing to a relationships success. If the classic "it is who you know, not what you know" still applies then it is well worth it looking into.

SCARF is an acronym - surprise, you did not see that coming, did you? You thought it was a magical fashion accessory passed down through a long line of proud middle management families. It is not and I apologize because there are magical pieces of clothing that give you superpowers but this post is not about them.

These are not magic either, they made to look like boobs.

Before we delve into the life altering effects of the hidden meanings of 5 alphabetic letters that conveniently make a word, we have to understand a standard principle of human psychology and it concerns motivation. The brain has two settings when it comes to action - either you are motivated or you are not. Motivating people means they respect your authority, they like being around you and they will always take a little extra time when helping you out. Demotivating people is the opposite in meaning but not in action. When you demotivate somebody their response to your requests will be pure apathy. To explain this further a demotivated person won't be excited that you have just set your hair alight but they won't be running to find a fire extinguisher either.

Going further I will use real life examples displayed by the worst manager I have come across in my short existence. Bear in mind that I have had a multitude of jobs in different positions and have worked for every stereotype imaginable. The director of the college I studied at was a proud and tyrannical beast with a penchant for Scottish wit and a completely unrealistic view of people. He made my life excruciatingly difficult and I have absolutely no regard for his advice or authority. I would not hold so little regard for him if he hadn't thrown the two people I started a successful catering company with out of his school for apparently personal and archaic reasons. This analogy will be known as the Martin principle.

S - Status 

Status refers to a persons self worth or their perception of the size of the contribution they are able to make and is easily confused with ego or social power. It boils down to self worth and confidence. If you can make a person feel more confident in their abilities you can increase their status. If you disagree with everything they say because they are Mormon and don't trust them, you are decreasing their status. If you take five minutes to personally acknowldege the contributions they have made you will increase their status. This is not about complimenting people for the sake of making them happy but recognizing worth when it right in front of you.

Martin Principle: Every idea or method of approaching a problem was met with complete disdain.. I was head of a group planning the very first Golf Day for the college and thought it would be easier if I made the budget available online so that it was always in easy reach of my group members. I got a foreboding warning that I have "re-invented" budgeting and that he misses when students used good ol' pen and paper. I started emailing him instead of having direct contact from that point on. Another example is a proposal I had written for a Movember fund raiser which is an international organisation that creates awareness for testicular cancer. I handed him a fully typed proposal complete with financials and he simply took the packet and threw it down at my feet. He did not even bother listening to any explanation but was appalled that I would approach him with such nonsense.

C- Certainty.

Easy as pie, certainty refers to whether or not you have actually conveyed exactly what you are expecting and how you would like it to be done. Managers so often forget that although they are all powerful their underlings do not have the same access to information and training as them. Demotivation occurs when the only instruction an employee receives is " do a good job and don't get fired." This leaves a massive hole of understanding that impedes any action. "What do you consider a good job, how do I accomplish that, what will get me fired?" are all questions you as a manager just left unanswered.

Martin Principle: I had indicated on my second day of college that in order to pay back my student loans I would have to work an extra few days every couple of months. My request was honest and was a last resort compromise between the college and my employers. I was offered many options by my employers and they actively worked around my schedule. I was told by the Martin that I would be able to take those days. A few months later I was in a complete bind and approached the school concerning the arrangement that had already been agreed upon. I happily worked five days driving a camper van down the coast for a couple completing a mountain bike race. Two days later I had an official warning against my name and my parents had been called because of my untrustworthiness,. I actually cried in front of the Martins wife at the unfairness of it all and was still labelled a delinquent.

A- Autonomy

The next as a manager comes down to the space you are willing to let your employees work in. There are probably very specific ways of getting the job done in time but then their are also plenty of ways that you as a manager have not thought of yet. It is easy to demotivate somebody by combining the demotivation of uncertainty with that of micro management. If you hand over all the monthly reports and ask the underling to "do the accounting" and then complain about the way he used excel you are a bastard and should stop. The mere fact that you have given the underling a task means he will try accomplish it in the best and timeliest fashion, i just found out timeliest is a word - hell yea English. Give them the room to discover how to do that and  intervene when their good intentions go awry.

Martin Principle: Basically everything that arised from original thought was seen as an unprovoked attack on his personality. After all he had been through, how dare I try a different method. This issue mainly concerned the use of technology. I as a new generation social media whore that was familiar with the positive attributes of a blog. As a result I started a class blog for the enjoyment of thirty people and would contribute a significant amount of time ensuring my class had constant updates and new material to view. Once discovering my blog he was incredibly disappointied because in a single post, out of the more than a hundred posted by then, I had told the class that I love them like my family. "How can you say you love people", he asked with horror on his face. I bit my tongue and told him I would not mention the college by name from then on. The blog went onto have more than a 1000 individual views a month but it was still a massive pain in his ass.

I always have time for Managerial venn diagrams, don't you?

R - Relatedness

As a manager it is your duty to remember important facts about people that work for you. Yes I know it is very annoying and you have ten trillion things to do but also you can understand how demotivating it is to arrive at work and put in a full day and then blow your birthday candle out by yourself. This is not some technique either it is frikken human decency. As a manager the advice is to at least have a conversation to try understand your staff. It isn't that difficult, next time Susie is late ask her why. Maybe she had to take two trains and leaves three hours before you do. It is all just a little understanding.

Martin Principle.
My best friend in the world studied with me at college. Half way through the first year she developed a chronic and life changing condition that forced her to change her entire lifestyle and endure surgery every few months. Martin did not hede any notice and took the fact that she was sick for so many days as a form of personal insult. While she was recovering from having a section of her intestine removed he was publicly contemplating why she did not have a "work ethic". What he did not understand was the damage he was doing to his own character. Everybody knew what was happeing to my friend and every time he complained about her absenteeism, my colleagues asked themselves if he would be disappointed if they died, because he would no longer have a full class.

F- Fairness 

In the broad spectrum of managerial life do you treat everybody equally or do you reserve your best for the people that look sort of like you? Do you have different punishments for different individuals based on their social  proximity to you? Let iit be known that everybody is counting straws and feels hard done by when you let one go and when to drown another. Fairness is equality.

MArtin Principle: I felt early on that he had taken a special interest in me simply because people kept being astonished by the amount of times I had been called into his office. The main issue was the absenteeism related to work. Their were members of my class that were working as well that I do no recall ever being reprimanded for missing class. I was reprimanded for going out to lunch instead of eating at the college. C'mon Mr Martin? I bid you a farewll and hope you never have a say in my personal life ever again. Au Revoir. :)

The top 5 ways to get fired as a Guest Service Agent

Buying guests drugs when they ask for them.

In the deep underworld of great service I always just assumed that drugs were something a hotel covertly acquired for high paying guests. Now bear with me, after the lengths I have seen the hotels go to, to keep guests happy, it is an easy assumption to make. Hence the most awkward conversation I have had with management so far. I spent the next few hours wracked with guilt that it might have been a secret shopper and my first review would contain the sentence, "Agent attempted to solicit cocaine but was unsuccessful." I later witnessed the guest drunkenly stroking the potted plant in the lobby and breathed a sigh of relief.  I won't go into further details except to say that hotels do not and cannot offer you drugs at the front desk.

Like this, only I am wearing a suit.

Walking in on a guest without knocking.

This seems extremely obvious and I can see you have raised one eyebrow in a condescending  manner but I digress. Part of my day is checking room discrepancies where the front desks status of the room differs from that of housekeeping. This means that you have to physically walk to each room and check if there is anybody currently occupying it. You alway start off with three good knocks and a pause but after 26 floors and forty rooms it is more of a slight tap and enter. If you add the fact that the last 13 rooms have all been empty and it feels like you are on a roll, you begin to take chances and just enter the room. This is how all the front office horror stories happen, from naked guests, love making guests, masturbating guests to guests drunkenly sobbing over their fast food. My only experience  so far went something like this. I opened the door and the room was pitch dark, I walked in and announced "guest service agent" in a hushed but confident shout. A woman rolled over in the bed and hissed "Shut up, I know its you and shower, you are drunk"   I left without saying a word and realized later that she had thought I was her husband.

"I am so sorry mam, I am just checking if you are enjoying your stay"

Giving a guest an upgrade because they are sexy.

I have indicated before that the person at the front desk has the power to give you an upgrade based on a whole vat full of trivial reasons. However those reasons have to align with a sales or business orientation of some magnitude when you later explain it to management. Especially if they now have to downgrade a VIP guest because all the suites have now been sold. Being the full blooded male that I am, I have had the opportunity and desire to upgrade a guest based solely on the stir that occurred inside of me while they were patiently waiting for their room keys. I have not done this however because my current management are actually quite equipped to do their jobs. The "I gave them an upgrade because it was their dog's birthday " will fall flat if my manager meets the guest at a later stage and they happen to still be so darn good looking.
.

Not checking if a visitor is on the reservation.

Guests are frequently upset by the hotels policy that, unless you are on the reservation, you may not get keys to a room and I can understand why. Most of the time a guest will just have forgotten to include his wife, or friends, name on the reservation. Sometimes the guest is unreachable and the wife or friend have no option but to sit in the lobby and wait. Waiting makes people angry. This rule is not for most people.

Stalkers or crazy ex-husbands don't come with a easily recognizable flag attached to their heads that makes filtering them out from the general population easy. They look just like you and me and to stop them from getting access to you and murdering you, we refuse to give them keys. One of my managers told me a story of when he was just starting out and still naive enough to be believe that all people sharing a last name are in a happy committed relationship. He gave, a warm friendly woman, a key to her husbands room. Little did he know that the gentleman was having an affair. The husband later sued the hotel for a breach of service, privacy is something most hotels promise, and won.

Occupied check-in. 

Every professional has a career ending mistake summed up in a phrase that is always at the back of your mind. For chefs it is "salmonella poisoning" and coincidentally for police officers and porn stars it is "accidental discharge." In the hotel world it is simply an "occupied check in." An occupied check in occurs when you check in two sets of guests into the same room. Everything that can happen to a Guest Service Agent when they walk in to a room unannounced, can now happen to a paying conservative family of four. You try explaining to the Jones's why they walked in on the Smiths on their wedding night. No amount of free breakfasts or pictures of puppies is going to remove the images they just witnessed from their minds. My biggest fear is I orchestrate an occupied check in to guests in one of the multi-roomed suites because not only are they the highest paying guests but with multiple rooms they could share the same suite for hours before realizing they are not alone.  

My 2 cents on religion.

Just saying. Also it really grates my carrot when I check priests into rooms that are being sold for a few hundred, sometimes thousands, bucks a night. How different do you think the world would be if churches were just inclusive community meetings and every hour of prayer was spent volunteering?  

The 5 things: Life have has taught me.

I haven't posted in a week which in internet time makes my last post a message from the dark ages with as much meaning as a Cosmo article from 2002. Seriously just stop reading that crap.

I will post, about the bars and museums I have been to lately, tomorrow. I admit that I lagged this week, returning to the familiar instead of pushing into the unknown. With 10 000 restaurants in NYC alone, it all feels like I am shining a torch into the grand canyon and explaining how beautiful the view is, but give me a break.

The top 5 things life has taught me. 

5. Be the best friend you can be.

Luckily High school was pretty awful for me. I am not being judgmental about the people who had it easy in high school at all. Who knows what shapes their lives and decisions? I certainly do not. I however did not have that many friends in high school. Sure, I was friendly with a lot of people, the same way I am friendly with the waiter at Mc Donald's or my accounting lecturer. A smile and small talk is not friendship, it's common courtesy. My friendships lacked depth and because of that I was able to see the people who were bargaining their time and the people who simply wanted to spend time with me.

Beyond that I learnt that forming judgments of people certainly gets you absolutely nowhere. I can imagine what kind of image you would form of me, if you only had my friends to base my existence on, but I can promise that I am not the person they would have you think I am.

The lesson to learn here is don't be friends with someone because of what they can offer you socially and don't not be friends with someone based on the voices around you. People are stupid, even when they mean well and are looking after your best interest, they are still stupid.

Be friends with the people who don't demand anything from you except time. The kind where you know it doesn't matter if you don't speak for a month because their kid will still punch your kid in the face at some point in time.

4. Don't listen to authority figures.

This and this and this. I have been dissapointed more times, by people who should no better, than I want to count. I had a psychologist tell me once that my view on life is far too positive to be natural and that I was being delusional. A few weeks later I moved to New York fulfilling a dream many had told me was out of my reach and simply impractical.

Firstly I think the misunderstanding is generational and I have spoke about this to a fair number of people who disagree with me but I am choosing to stick to my guns. As the forefront of the Google generation we often went to the internet for answers long before we asked authority figures about their ideas. Secondly what the internet had to say was often so different, I actually became defensive to old age advice. The way I see it: our parents and grand parents are the two generations that shaped the world between now and WW2 and now although we progressed monumentally, the progress has been misshapen and twisted, serving very specific ideoligies and beliefs. Thank you, but for the fist time in history we have an entire generation thinking globally instead of nationally, even racially, and it is our turn to run with the baton.

Lastly and controversially, it was not my generation that was running the show and voting in the elections that got us in to the current mess of global finance and politics and - sorry to say it- it will be us that gets us out of it .

"Be careful of whose advice you buy but be patient with those that supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of dishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it is worth" Baz Lurhman - Wear sunscreen


3. Make out with as many people as possible. 

Ha ha ha ha ha but yes. My meaning for this point is to have as much fum as you can without breaking your own moral code and being disgusting. We are so often told that pure enjoyment is useless and not worth it. It has gotten to the point where you need a reason to drink at a bar other than you are at a bar. Listen here world, I can still be the best employee, I can still jump onto the bar, take my shirt off and laugh so hard I tear the corners of my lips, on my day off. For fudge sake, we are men and women in every aspect of our lives lets behave like men and women when we are having fun.

2. Drinking makes things easier.

Tongue in cheek and business orientated. Being able to control your drink makes you a social genius. Business deals if conducted properly happen over a drink with a person who has no option but to now be your friend. Colleagues will appreciate you so much more if you got just as drunk as them at the Halloween function and were still the most entertaining. It is't about getting drunk, it is about getting appropriately dunk so that you can have fun and the people around you will feel comfortable. Say my friend has four beers, being completely sober and being completely smashed will have the same affect. Just meet them where it feels right and you will be fine. Nobody ever said social navigation was easy, people keep complaining how hard it is, learn this!

1. Work as hard as possible 

The rest is all semantics, the best and easiest honest way to move forward in the world is to be the hardest working individual you know. Sucks to be a woman, awesome to be a man, I know. In all truth it is the only way you want and should be recognized. I had a geography teacher tell me that I should work smart, not hard. Screw that, I will work smarter and harder than everybody else to ensure I have the future I envisage for myself and if I fall down I will pick myself up and make up for lost time.

The secret to working the hardest is easy. PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE and some more PRACTICE. More practice than anyone can believe! Managers will go to you first to solve problems and so will your colleagues. Ernie Ese said , "the harder I practice the luckier I get." There is no way around this little fact of life but it is the one that will get you furthest.