Again with the rule-following.
I was reminded this morning of a time, long long ago: I was playing clarinet, sitting between two girls (I was about to call them "young women," but really, they were maybe 15 or 16, and I couldn't have been older than 17 myself at the time). I hit a wrong note, and both of them turned towards me. The funny thing is, of course, that they weren't playing any more, so they missed a lot more than just one note, but their desire to point out my mistake was apparently more important than actually playing.
Charles Bolton, the band director used to say, "I'd rather hear the wrong note than not hear the right one." I always liked him.
Anyway, besides a Monday trip down memory lane, it struck me that Mai was just like one of these girls: just waiting for me to mess up something and point it out to me. Did she have other work to do? Probably. Did I have something better I could have been doing? Maybe not.
Occassionally, I really did something that I wasn't necessarily supposed to d0--the phone of course was for business purposes only--but was anyone in the lobby at the time? And we had multi-line phones, so I wasn't "tying up" anything either. Some would of course say that I was still breaking the rules, and that the rules need to be enforced. I continue to reply that context is everything: what is the intention behind the rule?
3 comments:
I don't remember if I told you this or not, but my ex-boyfriend used to work front desk at a hotel in Baltimore. He was working his way through the training to be a manager when we broke up. He used to call me from work and then feel guilty about it, which is pretty funny now realizing how much Mai reminds me of him.
Which hotel?
A Marriott, although I imagine there are multiple Marriotts in Baltimore and I don't know which one.
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