Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Winter 2014 - (Page 80)

behind the scenes The Process step 1 Mr. W's first instinct was to alert the member of the hotel's stewarding staff who had been in charge of setting up and breaking down the room. "You can imagine being approached by a guest requesting a needle to be found in the hotel haystack," Mr. W recalled, "and being less than hopeful that anything can truly be done." But instead, Mr. W was surprised and delighted to find that this intrepid employee immediately contacted his superiors, thus starting the seemingly impossible task of finding those cards. step 2 As this was happening, Mr. W also reached out to the hotel's head of security, Gerardo Flores, who came to the conference space to meet with the increasingly frantic client. Flores offered to use the hotel's security cameras to review the events of the past few hours in order to determine who picked up the cup, what he or she did with it and where it eventually ended up. He then returned to his office and began playback. step 3 By this point, word of the search had made its way to meetings and special events manager Edel Taylor, a three-year veteran of The Ritz-Carlton, Los Angeles, and Christian Schreiner, who came to the property after about eight years with the company. Taylor and Schreiner put their heads together to determine the next steps. "Immediately," remembers Schreiner, "the answer jumped in my head. 'Well, it's gone to the trash because the room has already been cleared.'" Even with that conviction, however, the pair decided to await word back from Flores before resorting to what everyone at this point knew would likely be the endgame: sifting through the mounds of trash in the hotel's dumpsters. step 4 Flores soon reported back that, unfortunately, his search through the security footage proved fruitless: Despite a valiant effort on his part, the registration table sat just outside the range of his cameras' cleanest pictures and, therefore, provided no leads. With that, Schreiner removed his blazer, donned a pair of industrial-strength latex gloves and made his way to the bowels of the hotel and the large metal dumpsters contained therein. But when he arrived, he recalls, "I didn't see the bags of trash anywhere." He was puzzled. "I would have been able to recognize the types of bags we were using, how many of them there were and what would be inside them." But he didn't see anything familiar. He was ready to dumpster dive, but as far as he could tell, there was nothing to dive for. 80 w w w. r i t z c a r lt o n . c o m step 5 Disheartened, Schreiner was getting ready to return to the event space to give Mr. W the bad news when he realized the obvious: He'd gone to the wrong trash area. "The hotel is so big, we have two," he says. "It came to me that, because of where the event was held, the steward would have actually sent the bags to a different one." He raced out of this first garbage dock and made his way to the second. The Resolution Upon arriving at the other dumpster area, Schreiner peeked his head over the receptacle's edge and immediately identified this trash as the garbage he was looking for. Viewing the bags' contents through their translucent exterior - and evidencing a unique ability to combine the sleuthing skills of a crackerjack detective with the culinary know-how of the food-andbeverage expert - he remembers, "I could recognize them because I saw the food we'd been serving at our event." Next up? "I had to pretty much jump in there," he says. He sought out the bags that seemed to have the greatest concentration of relatively uncontaminated coffee cups in them, and then, on only his second dip into a sack of debris, he pulled out a winner: that never-before-used, bright-blue Ritz-Carlton coffee cup - filled with the cache of perfectly clean business cards. The Aftermath Trophy in hand, Schreiner contacted Taylor, and she immediately reached an overjoyed Mr. W, who, thinking the cards a lost cause, had just left the hotel with his (presumably sheepish) interns. The group turned back around to claim their prized possessions, and, when they arrived at the hotel, Taylor took them to meet the man who'd stopped at nothing to find those cards. Shaking Schreiner's no longer latex-gloved and by-now thoroughly washed hand, Mr. W expressed his everlasting gratitude. ("I would never ask anyone to subject themselves to rummaging through waist-high garbage," Mr. W later said, "yet this is exactly what Mr. Schreiner had done.") Looking back on the events of that day, however, it's that irresponsible intern, now spared at least some embarrassment, whom Schreiner remembers as the most appreciative. For her part, Taylor is pretty sure Mr. W will never let his interns mishandle important documents like these. "We told him to forget disposable coffee cups from now on. Next time, we'll get him whatever proper containers he needs to do the job right." http://WWW.RITZCARLTON.COM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Winter 2014

Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Winter 2014
Contents
Contributors
Editor’s Letter
President’s Letter
Falling in Love With ... Bangalore
Design
Shopping
Gifts
Beauty
Jewelry
Watches
Tradition
Behind the Scenes
Family
Local Knowledge
Outdoors

Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Winter 2014