Speech

My job consists of a lot of talking. I answer phones and speak to people face-to-face for 40 hours every week, and I've done so for many years. Whether I'm explaining the differences in the two wings of the property, telling people things to do in the area, directing people where to go to dinner, asking for information when making reservations, or making small talk during check-in, I spend a lot of my day speaking. Because I talk to people from all over the globe I've done my best over the years to speak as clearly and concisely as possible so that, even in the case of language barriers, guests understand what I'm talking about.

In the last few days I've had a couple people comment on how I talk. One lady checked in the other day and mentioned how nice and professional my phone voice was when I had made her reservation the week before. A few hours ago a guest from the Netherlands asked if I was from the US, and then thanked me, saying my accent was clear and easy to understand. It's really uplifting, especially considering I wasn't really great at talking for a long while.

I have vague memories of being four years old. They're the kind of murky scenes that almost seem like dreams, but I do remember seeing a speech therapist, though I didn't know what was going on at the time. When I was at an age where most kids would speak pretty normally, I had an expressive vocabulary of about ten to fifteen words. Apparently I communicated in a lot of whines and grunts for the most part, with a select few words here and there when absolutely needed. This understandably worried my parents, so they sent me in for a bunch of tests. Doctors didn't see anything abnormal with me developmentally, so they suggested a speech therapist. I remember hanging out at the preschool with a lady that had me play a lot of games and talked to me a lot, which apparently helped me expand my vocabulary and form words, so by the time I started school I was on the same level as the rest of the kids. As the story goes, I haven't shut up since.

As I grew up I participated in school plays, getting background roles as a little kid and some speaking roles with actual lines to memorize later on, so I learned how to speak clearly and project my voice. In high school, since they cut from freshman year until after I graduated, I got into writing. That evolved into speeches, so I took my memorization and projection skills from school plays, applied it to speech contests, and did okay with them. However, even though I could do speeches well enough, there was one thing I had a really, really hard time doing: talking to small groups and individual people. Public speaking terrifies a lot of people, but I found that talking at an audience is easier than talking to a single person. While I could orate to a room of people about some social issue, I couldn't order fast food without being a nervous wreck, or answer a phone call from a number I didn't know. The first time I asked a girl out I was 19 and I thought I was going to puke. I wanted to die during my first job interviews. Even though I was a decent public speaker I was still, at my core, really, really, painfully shy.

I want to write about how I came out of my shell and went from being an introverted kid to a social butterfly in some kind of spiritual awakening, but honestly it was just from the hotel job. Prior to the front desk I did maintenance work and kitchen work, which was fine by me because talking to people scared me and there isn't much human interaction while washing dishes or shoveling horse poop. I didn't know much about hotels when I first started, but since it was just a summer job I figured I'd roll with what was presented to me. I spent a lot of the time stumbling over words, nervously mumbling over the phone, and clamming up when presented with questions, but as the weeks went on I got a little more comfortable with talking to people. When the summer job got longer my people skills improved and my speaking ability gained more polish. Now, almost nine years later, not only is this the longest summer job I've ever had, but I can talk to pretty much anyone without much trouble.

Then again, it helps that I get paid for it. I'm still a nervous person and inherently introverted. Plus, half the time I think my voice really is annoying (the other half I think it sounds like my dad, which I guess is okay but it's still a little weird to me). Either way, I have to admit talking to people is a lot easier now than it was when I was a kid. I can strike up conversations with strangers without much trouble, make appointments without getting too nervous, answer phone calls just fine, and even order fast food (I still panic in the drive-thu though because people are waiting behind me and the clerk is waiting for my order and I always forget what I want whenever it's my time to order so I blurt out a random number and hope it's a combo I'll like).

Maybe it's stupid, but I'm kind of proud of myself for growing from a kid that didn't talk at all, to a kid that was too shy to talk, to having people impressed enough by my speaking abilities to tell me about it. Sure, it may have come from nearly a decade of having pretty much no choice but to get good with speech, but I'm still flattered when little old ladies come up to the front desk and say, "Are you the young man who made my reservation? You have such a lovely phone voice, you sound so nice! Thank you, Eric!"

They never call me by my actual name. Nothing I can say will change that, but it's close enough and I'm too flattered to care.