I'm A Hotel Clerk

I'm a hotel clerk. I make room reservations, check-in guests, attend to rooms, and maintain things as needed in both the facility and in concierge services. One perk about this job, though, is the people-watching and interactions I get. I meet a lot of people every day, especially in the busy months at the hotel, and it's easy to forget how much there is to the people-watching aspect of standing at the desk.

I talk to people from all over the world. Since I work as a desk clerk in a hotel that sits between Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Yosemite, Tahoe, and basically every place to see in California and Nevada, I'm constantly talking to people from all over Europe, Asia, South America, and Oceania. This week I talked to a few guys from Serbia, helped out a Taiwanese couple book a room, gave some French tourists directions, and worked around language and cultural barriers like I do ever day of the work week. I like to think that adds a degree of uniqueness to my job; that, in the middle of nowhere, there's a melting pot of nationalities, all stopping for the night during their tour of the American West.

Every walk of life comes through, too; young families moving across the state, old retired couples vacationing from the East Coast, affluent yuppies with money to spare, poor folks looking for a cheap place to crash for the night, all kinds from all over talk to me on a regular basis. I hear ideas and opinions from people every day, some progressive and interesting, other ill-informed and occasionally racist. Some folks are kind. Others are mean. Most are indifferent. Everyone is generally pretty tired.

It's a funny job, being the guy who gets total strangers to pay for places to crash for the night, but I credit working here to me actually being able to be social and a little more comfortable with myself. Thanks to being in front of so many people from so many backgrounds for so long I've managed to come out of my shell. Thanks to tourists from all over the planet I've learned how to determine where some accents are from. Thanks to catering to everyone I've learned how to accept-- or, at the very least, tolerate-- pretty much everyone.

Being at the front desk eight hours a day and five days a week makes my job a fairly big part of my life. I actually don't know if I'd be the kind of person I am now if it weren't for being inundated with social interaction and personalities while at work, so I'm pretty grateful to have become the person I am now while meeting so many interesting people along the way.

And I'm glad to get paid for people-watching.