Force Majeure

by Valerie Lehman

The first calls came in late January of 2020, and they were not cancellations yet. They were nervous people.

There was barely any news to speak of at that point. Something going around in China, a few headlines, nothing anyone had settled on a name for in daily conversation. But I work in a building that fills up with people who got on airplanes to get there. Citywide conventions, international groups, the big annual conferences. Ninety percent of my business required somebody to travel, which means ninety percent of my clients were already doing the math in their heads two weeks before the rest of us.

So they called. Not to cancel, exactly. To ask what would happen if. And in late January, the answer was the answer it had always been: you have a contract, and if you cancel you lose your deposit and you do not get your money back. I said that sentence out loud to perfectly nice people for about three weeks, which in retrospect was roughly two and a half weeks too long.

The Clause

Hotel contracts are tight. They are deliberately, unromantically tight. You cannot cancel because you changed your mind. You cannot cancel because you broke up with your fiancé. Your company going bankrupt is, and I say this with love, not our problem. There is exactly one door out of a hotel contract, and it is called force majeure.

Force majeure means act of God. It means the thing that happened is outside your control, outside our control and outside the world's control, and because of that, nobody may host this event. The clause protects the hotel and the client equally. Deposits come back. The contract dissolves. In thirty-nine years I had read that paragraph on every contract I had ever signed and had never once had cause to use it.

By about the third week of February we were using it constantly. We started releasing people and moving dates. Annual conferences went to the following year, because an annual conference has its dates and will die on that hill. Everything else got pushed six weeks. Six weeks was the number everybody picked, including me. Six weeks felt generous. Six weeks felt like the outside edge of reasonable. We all believed, with our whole chests, that somebody was going to fix this.

My company let people out without penalty before the government ever told us we had to. Not every hotel did that. I want it noted that mine did.

April 1

The mandates came the second week of March. No gatherings over a certain size, no events, stay home unless you have a reason not to. By the twentieth the world was shut.

Then came the meeting where they told us that the hotel would be keeping a handful of upper management and letting the rest of us go indefinitely. Sales managers, administrative staff, servers, housekeepers. Ninety to ninety-five percent of the building. And then they did the one genuinely kind thing available to them, which was to hold the layoff until April 1 so that everyone who had insurance through the hotel got another full month of it. Nobody yet knew what unemployment was going to look like, or whether the government was going to add anything to it, so an extra month of health coverage was not a gesture. It was a cushion, and people needed it.

The last day was strange because it did not feel like a last day. Nobody packed. I did not take a single thing off my desk. It was presented as "go collect unemployment and we will bring you all back when this is over," and I think most of us heard the word break. A little time off. The extra three hundred a week showed up in the conversation soon after, which did not hurt.

Then the actual unemployment process began, and I would like to describe it accurately: it was a nightmare. Three quarters of California lost their jobs at the same moment and all of us called the same office. I spent hours on the phone that I will never get back, asking where the benefits were, asking how the extensions worked, asking whether anyone could see my file. Mine eventually came through and paid correctly. People I worked with waited the better part of a year and some never got a dime. I was out for fourteen months and I was one of the lucky ones, which tells you where the bar was.

The Best Kind

In August of 2020 I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

My doctors called it, and I am quoting them, the best kind of breast cancer. I went to every biopsy by myself. Every ultrasound by myself. The lumpectomy by myself, because nobody was allowed in the building with you. Then six weeks of radiation, every single weekday, and here is where the timing becomes almost funny. I could not have taken that time off work. Not six weeks of daily appointments, not in my job. I had no job, so I could go.

My husband kept working, remotely, from the house. I am fairly confident that being alone in that house all day for fourteen months would have unraveled him completely, so in a sideways way we rescued each other. We cooked. I did repairs that had been pending since the previous decade. I took up paint by number and got genuinely good at it, and I painted him a Van Gogh.

We decided to buy bikes, along with every other person in the United States, which is how I learned there is no such thing as a bicycle during a pandemic. We found two beach cruisers. We rode them at a couple of parks. Otherwise we got in the car and drove around for no reason at all, and we could not go far, because there was not an open bathroom between our house and the horizon. Fast food, no. Gas stations, locked. You plan your whole afternoon around a bladder.

Skeleton Crews

We drove to Portland because we were not getting on a plane. Twenty-six hours, broken into eight-hour days, which meant hotel stays, which meant I got to tour my own industry in its worst clothes.

Everyone was on a skeleton crew. No restaurants, no room service, nobody to clean your room while you were in it. Masks everywhere, stanchions keeping you six feet off the back of the person in front of you, hand sanitizer stations at every corner like fire extinguishers. The rest stops on the way were mostly closed, which brings us back to the bathroom problem, which never did get solved.

My own property stayed open, which I only fully understood later. They had traveling nurses in, a big block of them brought in to help Kaiser, plus other people who had come to town to assist with food and healthcare and all the things that had suddenly become hard to get. A building that runs on about 250 employees was being held together by fewer than twenty, most of them directors, doing jobs that had never appeared in any description they had signed, including security. When I came back and heard what those fourteen months had actually been like for them, my envy evaporated entirely.

Coming Back

They called me back in May of 2021, and I was the first one. Twelve people in that sales department and they had kept exactly two, the director and the associate director. When meetings became legal again, somebody had to be in catering, and the thinking was that people who had been sitting in their houses for over a year would want to throw a party. Celebrations were my market. So I got the call.

What I came back to was a room math problem. A classroom setup that used to seat three to a six-foot table now seated one. So twenty people needed a room built for eighty, which meant a bigger room, more tables, more labor, more of everything. Food could not go out on normal china and silver. Every utensil wrapped, every item packaged, limited menus, servers in masks, surfaces wiped down between breaths.

And the clients, back from fourteen months of nothing, arrived convinced that all of this should be discounted. Deeply. Because it was weird, and because they were doing us a favor by booking at all. I would explain that the restrictions had tripled the footprint and the labor, and they would nod and ask again about the discount.

It took close to a year for the business to feel like business, and probably two before it really was. The fear in people outlasted the rules by a wide margin, and some of what came back was not fear at all but a shorter fuse and a stronger sense of being owed.

I set a room for twenty that spring and stood in the doorway looking at it. Eighty chairs' worth of space, sixty of them empty on purpose, and big vinyl circles on the carpet by the front desk showing grown adults exactly where to stand.