Small Town Worries

(I work in a small hotel in a small town in Canada. It is winter and we are dead. We do have a hockey tournament in town this weekend and three teams are staying with us, but they are all arriving tomorrow except for a small handful of rooms. Usually, when we are dead like this I read a book, or play on the computer, but I’ve been doing a lot of crochet projects for Christmas lately and I have one last project to finish in the next two days. Knowing we will be slow, I bring the project to work to try and finish before the weekend. I’ve done this before, though not often, and the owner and several staff members have seen me doing it before with no issue. For some reason, today is different.)

Owner: “You can’t be doing that at the desk.”

Me: *surprised but rolling with it* “Oh, okay.”

Owner: “When we are slow like this you should be on the computer, checking reservations to make sure we have all the information. If you’ve checked today’s, then check tomorrow and other upcoming days. Or go online and look up restaurant locations and local events so you can tell guests about them if they ask. Find out where the train station is so you can give directions to guests.”

Me: “Okay.”

(All the while, I was thinking to myself: “I’ve lived here for three years, and have been visiting my wife and her family here since we started dating almost eight years ago. I always took the train up, so I know where the train station is. We are a small town of about 25,000, and we are a river tourism town; there is NOTHING going on in town right now except for the hockey tournament that is all coming in tomorrow. If I check future reservations, I’ll be all the way into June or July — that’s how slow it gets here in the winter. I know and have been to almost all the restaurants in town with my wife or her family. Not sure what else you really want me to do here.” To appease the owner, I went and checked the guest information for that day and compared it to the other places we keep records; it was all accurate. That took two minutes. I went and looked at all the arrivals for that weekend. Three hockey teams were to arrive the next day, and some of them were missing info, but I couldn’t put it in until they arrived, anyway, so I was not sure what the point of that was. Ten more minutes. I checked out the local tourism website and found the events calendar. It was blank, just like I’d thought, but I did add the link to our desktop for future use. Five more minutes. I checked Google for all the local restaurants; they were all still open and none of them had moved. Three more minutes. Half an hour later, I’ve done everything the owner asked, so now I’m on NAR submitting this story before going to read some myself.)