Forty Pounds of Bible

by Valerie Lehman

Part of my fire safety training, in my first year in hotels, was the assignment of a book.

Not a binder. A book. The event space at that hotel was recorded in enormous hardbound albums roughly four feet by four feet, and in the event of a fire, each of us in the catering and sales office was responsible for grabbing one and carrying it out of the building. They weighed about forty pounds apiece. I remember standing there nodding seriously while privately deciding that if that hotel ever caught fire, the Bible was going to have to save itself.

That's what we called them. The big books, or the Bible, depending on who was talking and how the day was going. Each one covered about six months of event space, ruled into little squares for every ballroom and meeting room in the building. Into your square went the name of the group, the name of the client, their phone number, the type of event and the hours. All of it in pencil, because bookings fall apart constantly and someone else needs that square. We kept the old-school pink erasers on hand, the fat ones from grade school, and you could take out an entire Tuesday with one good pass.

The X

Here is the first thing you learn about shared space. Catering managers and group sales managers are two different species, and the big book made it visible.

I would open to a week I wanted and find, at the top of a page, "ABC Company," and then one enormous pencil X drawn corner to corner across every room in the house. No contact name. No phone number. No indication of whether this was a real piece of business or a rumor someone heard at a trade show. Just a hold on the entire hotel, signed by a colleague who was now on vacation in Palm Springs.

I want to be fair to them. They still do it. The only difference is that today it takes a single click in Delphi, on a button that is actually called All Space Hold, and nobody has to press hard enough to leave a groove in the paper.

Everything Was Typed By Someone Else

We did not have computers, so I hand wrote my BEOs onto a printed form and handed them to the secretary, who typed them. That was the workflow. That was the whole thing. A catering manager's handwriting was a matter of departmental concern.

Then the typed BEOs had to be reproduced for every department in the building, and for that we had a machine I have never quite been able to name with confidence. I believe it was a mimeograph. It had a crank. You turned the crank, a great inked drum went around, and out came copies in that particular purple-blue that anyone over sixty recognizes instantly and slightly fondly. If you have ever complained about changing a toner cartridge, I would like you to sit with the fact that changing the ink on that machine put blue on your hands for a week. Not a smudge. A tint. You went to dinner like that.

Banquet checks were worse, and banquet checks mattered, because the check is the receipt for the event. Ours came in little triplicate slips, almost exactly like a dry cleaning ticket, with carbon paper between the pages. One copy for the file, one for the client, one for the banquet department so they had their record of the charges when audit came around.

You could not make a mistake on those. The typewriters of that era corrected by backspacing and striking over, which looked acceptable on the top sheet and looked like a ransom note on the carbons. Liquid whiteout was no help at all, because the carbon had already done its work underneath and your correction simply did not exist on copies two and three. So if you typed the wrong date, or the wrong count, or spelled the client's name the way it sounded, you pulled the whole thing out and started again with a fresh slip. I have retyped a banquet check four times over one digit.

The Noise

Somewhere in there was a dot matrix printer, and I could not tell you today what it printed, because the mimeograph was doing the BEOs and my memory of the printer is almost entirely auditory. It sat there going ba da da da da like a machine gun with a clerical job. The paper came in one continuous folded stack, wider than anything you would recognize as a page, with the strips of little holes running down both sides that you tore off afterward. Somebody's whole afternoon was spent tearing off those strips and separating pages along the perforations.

Communication was handled by pager. We had something in those years we called walkie-talkies, but they were limited and unreliable, so the real method was to page a banquet captain and enter your extension, and then wait for him to find a house phone. The gap between "the head table is short two chairs" and a man calling you back from a service corridor is not a large amount of time, unless you are standing in front of a head table that is short two chairs.

The Ashtray

The offices were also on fire, in a small way, most of the time.

At the Red Lion in Sea-Tac in 1980 and 1981 we had ashtrays on our desks. Everybody smoked, everywhere, at all hours, in the office and in the hotel and presumably in the elevator. I'm a smoker myself, which I have never been proud of, and at my second property I was the one who ruined it for everyone.

I had a walk-in appear at my desk. I did not want a stranger's first impression of the hotel to be my ashtray, so I dumped the whole thing into the little wastebasket by my chair and went off to greet him with a lovely smile. By the time I came back the wastebasket was burning. Nobody was hurt and nothing of value was lost, but after that there was no smoking in that office, or that hotel, ever again. I have never mentioned this at a job interview.

The Cabinet

I want to describe one more piece of equipment, because I have never seen another one and I think about it more than I should.

The big books for future years lived in a huge oak cabinet with sliding doors on the bottom. In catering you generally work a year out, so at any given time that enormous piece of furniture was storing two books. The top of it was a broad flat panel with a raised lip along the edge, purpose-built so you could lay a four foot book open and write in it standing up. A lectern for the Bible, essentially. That cabinet existed for one task and no other task on earth, and some hotel bought it on purpose.

Then computers arrived, and the first system I was trained on was called Miracle, which it was not. It had no meaningful cross-checks, which meant you could cheerfully book a ballroom that someone else had already booked, and the software would let you do it without a word of warning. Then came Breeze, which eventually became Delphi, which I have been using for about twenty five years and which will at least argue with you.

None of the old way was efficient. It took three people and a crank to send out a menu. But you wrote every booking with your own hand, in pencil, on a page you had to walk across the room to reach, and I knew the contents of that book the way you know your own kitchen in the dark. The pink erasers went down to nubs by August.