House of Lies

by Martin Kihn

  There is no more consistent phenomenon in U.S. hometel life than that the radio does not work. And why?

  It turns out there is a reason, and it has to do with your TV. Turn it on (you can’t listen to the radio, what else can you do?)… turn it on, press the green menu button, scroll around and you will find an option called “Radio Interactive,” which proffers up “stations” such as “Urban NiteClub” (Technotronic) and “Alternative Alley” (Cracker)… and these “stations” in turn play for you a selection of music in your chosen genre for the low, low price of $9.95 (plus tax) for two glorious hours. Plus, should you be particularly taken with any of the selections, there is the helpful little “Buy CD” button at the bottom of the screen.

  Once you stumble on this loathsome “service” you cannot help but look at your dysfunctional little dream machine radio/alarm as a deliberate act of sabotage on the part of the Marriott.

  You commit another act of sabotage upon your early-morning face. It is called shaving. Somehow, you can never quite match the motion to the surface when you’re on the road; there is always blood spillage and hard feelings. Often you will simply forget your own razor; you use the “complimentary” Marriott razors, available totally free of charge at the front desk, and these little blue plastic items are perhaps the cheapest solid matter on the planet; their purpose seems to be to seek out and destroy your dignity.

  But no matter. Today you have remembered your home razor. You shower… and shower… and shower… does the day have to begin? Does it really?

  Since you don’t really unpack, you don’t really pack. That’s the symmetry.

  6:54 a.m.

  7:07 a.m.

  Shoes, shirt, and service. Scan the room, the bathroom. Ninety percent of items left behind in hotel rooms are left in the bathroom. Ninety percent of hotel sheets test positive for semen. Everything related to hometel life is 90 percent, including the joylessness. This bathroom is empty but for your memories. You close the door, leaving the room key inside. Your memories are gone now. There is, of course, a USA Today in wait under your feet. You take pleasure, each day, in stepping over it.

  You are waiting for the elevator.

  Next to you is a man much like yourself—white, face flecked with dry scabs from a Marriott razor, garment bag (minus helium) in hand. You smile at one another but do not speak. To speak would be the collision of matter and antimatter—an explosion of sameness. You are not special. He is not special. It is a world of sad white men avoiding contact.

  You pass the front desk silently. You do not check out—you never check out. Although they do not say it, hotels do not particularly want you to check out. They know when you’re leaving; they don’t need to know that you’ve left.

  You are outside.

  You are in your Taurus, driving.

  At the office, your cramped cubi-kennel has become a storage medium for female luggage.58 This makes for close quarters. Martha is late and seems, when she does arrive, kind of out of it.

  Baloo takes a chance and says, “Are you okay?”

  Martha looks as if she is going to cry but says nothing. She nods.

  Meanwhile, Davo is standing with his back against the wall beside your cubi-kennel, cell phone pressed tight to his ear and jaw muscle, talking in no uncertain terms to his girlfriend/boyfriend/unknown. Normally discreet, he is out of line this morning.

  “Are you getting tested?” he whispers in the kind of whisper that is actually more audible in a closed environment than a room tone voice.

  “What are you telling me—that you don’t care what I think?”

  “Is there something you’re not—is there something I’m missing here…?”

  “We should talk about this later.”

  “I totally disagree with that and you’re being—I can’t believe how selfish you’re being but we have to talk about this later.”

  Then: “Good-bye.”

  Then, twenty seconds later: “Good-bye.”

  Then silence.

  A few minutes later we are gathered in the big tire conference room for a meeting. Davo is in a foul mood. Jeff is supposedly “meeting the client,” but he may be asleep. Jack is not present. Martha is moping.

  “We got some bad news last night,” Davo announces. “There was some pushback from the senior team and they want to see those inventory numbers cut a different way.”

  “What way?” asks Baloo.

  “That’s the thing. They’re not sure. But they do know they have to be recut.”

  “Recut how?”

  “Not sure. I’m just telling you what they told me. ‘Recut the numbers.’ So let’s look at this and figure it out.”

  “I’m sorry,” you say, not sorry at all, “but is there a deadline associated with this? A deliverable?”

  “What do you think?”

  “My guess is yes, there is.”

  “Your guess would be correct.”

  “And…?”

  “Jack called me this morning very early—and he let me know he wants something by three this afternoon. We’re going to meet after that to go over it.”

  This is very bad news, for very obvious reasons.

  “Shit,” says Martha, emerging from her mope in a rage, “I have a six o’clock flight. I have to be out of here by four-thirty.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” says Davo, “but change the flight.”

  Then back at the cubi-kennel, to be recutting the numbers.

  Recutting is an ambiguous word, and there is no direction, so you make a strategic decision. You step into the next cubicle and ask, “Say, Geraldo, did you take a look at that deck from last night?”

  “The one you guys did? On the inventory stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw it.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I’d—personally, I’d recut it.”

  “Okay. That’s interesting.”

  You use this phrase a lot: That’s interesting, or Interesting. What it really means is: I don’t know what else to say.

  So you wait.

  “Well, I’d try rolling up the skews.59 You guys had too many. Roll them into tire families and cut the inventory by stores.”

  “How would you do the stores?”

  “Company-owned, franchisees, and other.”

  “Three groups?”

  “Three groups.”

  “How would you roll the skews up?”

  “Personally? I would use a roll-up table I developed and happen to have on my PC right now.”

  The snake of a smile emerges from the cool depths of Geraldo’s self.

  “I imagine,” he says, “you guys might like to take a look at my table?”

  It used to bother you—the fact that highly paid you, marching in to save the day, knew absolutely nothing about the companies into which you marched to save the day. That any guy sitting in any cubicle on any floor knew infinitely more. This used to bother you—but now it does not, not at all. If you knew that much you’d have to change places with the guy in the cubicle.

  “Yeah,” you say. “Uh-huh.”

  11:34 a.m. Thursday.

  Numbers are recut, deck complete; Martha friendly toward you, her deliverer, since it turns out she absolutely has to make that flight at six o’clock or her husband will probably leave her (you don’t ask). Jack finally appears to bark a bit and retreat to whisper on the phone for hours. Top secret deals, or something other.

  And you do something you’ve never done before… something so egregious and wrong that it enters the realm of pure treason: You ask Geraldo to lunch, as a friend.

  He accepts.

  So you’re in the lunchroom, you and Geraldo, gnawing on some rubber chicken curry pasta or something, and it turns out that Geraldo has quite an interest in consulting. Quite a touching interest.

  “How much do you guys make?”

  “Gosh,” you say. “We do okay.”

  “I don’t mean you—you don’t make anything
. But what about, like, Jack? What’s he take in yearly, you think?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s pretty up there.”

  “Like a million? Over a million?”

  “Could be like that. I’m not really sure.” In truth, you have no idea what partners make. You don’t really care. Does this mean you’re in consulting for the wrong reasons? Perhaps.

  Geraldo reveals he has the soul—if not the tact—of a top-tier consultant when he broaches his next topic of the day.

  “So,” he probes, “what kind of points do you rack up in a year?”

  “What, you mean hotel points? Airline points?”

  “Whatever—I heard you guys take all your vacations on points. You have so many points you’re always upgraded—first-class this, first-class that. Business in the air and the suites and all that.”

  “Well, I guess I have a lot of points. They’re not really so great.”

  This stuns Geraldo—

  “Not so great? But everything is free—you don’t have to pay for it. It’s totally free. You can go around the world and… and stay for free wherever… go to Hawaii. You know how much I paid for my last vacation…?”

  “It’s not like that,” you say, feeling a little bit bad about it, too. “It’s not so great.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s like an illusion.”

  “An illusion?”

  “Yeah—it’s like a phony thing. It’s not real.”

  “But it’s free.”

  “Yes, it’s free. But it isn’t real.”

  The Myth of Points

  Loyalty points, frequent flier points, awards programs, status-gathering mechanisms, elite clubs and corporate memberships, redemption, tiers of service, automatic upgrades and upgrades fought for and denied, first-tier and second-tier reward rosters, and free selection matrices and dreams of ultimate leisure—these are the primary topics of discourse among top-tier management consultants, worldwide.

  They told you at recruiting events: “You get to keep your points.” At the time it alone seemed like a good enough reason to take a look. You may not be home much but you get free vacations in exotic lands… you can repair your marriage, or start a new one.

  And it is true—you travel for business, are reimbursed by the client, break more or less even… and any and all loyalty points thereby accumulated go to you personally. This arrangement seems too good to be true. Is it?

  There was an associate who worked with you on one of your engagements who was more obsessed than most with his points. He loved airlines, knew every quirk of status systems. He booked flights with extra legs—taking ten hours or more to travel from Washington, DC, to Chicago—simply to earn top status. And when he finally got there, you asked him: “Was it worth it?”

  “I got a Christmas present from the airline,” he said.

  “What was it?”

  “A bathrobe.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Was it a nice bathrobe?”

  “A little itchy. I can’t really wear it.”

  “What color?”

  “It has the airline logo on it.”

  “How much did it cost you?”

  “Like twenty thousand dollars…”

  As your wife, a wry folk musician who hates the open road, likes to point out: “Life is not a destination, it’s a gurney.”

  You travel a lot; you travel all the time. Every week you’re picking up a Taurus, riding in a plane. The points accumulate like silent magic. After six months or so you think: What have I won? You look into Hertz. As a proud number one Club Gold member—there is no Silver membership—you have been earning points for months. Each dollar spent gets you a point. In your city, an average rental day is about $75, so your typical four-day rental gets you around three hundred points every week.

  So it’s been six months and you’ve got what seems to you a truly impressive seventy-two-hundred points under your belt. You imagine a Jaguar or a Volvo; you imagine a month of free rides coast to coast, you and your proud wife clutching mittens. You imagine wrong. It turns out that Hertz attended the Ebeneezer School of Generosity. One free rental day costs twelve hundred points and a free rental week costs eighty-five-hundred. In other words, you have to rent a full-size Matador Red Ford Taurus four days per week for twenty-eight continuous weeks to earn the privilege of just one free weekly rental… oh, and number one Club Gold membership costs you $50 per year. The gifts are a form of myth, and the rewards a paid-for object lesson. You’re guessing Hertz makes quite a tidy profit on this “give-away”… and so much for your proud wife and her willing mittens…

  You called Hertz one day, to claim an award. You called the number one Club Gold hot line. This happened:

  “Number one Club Gold hot line, how can I help you?”

  “I would like to redeem some points.”

  “What now?”

  “I’d like to redeem points.”

  “What kind of points?”

  “I have number one points and I’d like to get a free rental. How do I do that?”

  “A free rental. Ah.” [Long pause.] “You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to redeem points for a free rental. How do I do it?”

  “Yes, we can do that.” [Long pause.] “Hello?”

  “How do I get my free rental?”

  “I said we can do that.”

  “How?”

  “You need a coupon.”

  “Where do I get the coupon?”

  “We can send it to you.”

  “Okay, then, I need to get a coupon.”

  “We mail you the coupon and you have to give it when you get to the Gold counter.”

  “Okay. How do I get the coupon?”

  “We mail it to you.”

  “Can I request one?”

  “You can request it online.”

  (Actually, you tried this; it did not at the time appear to be possible.)

  “Can I request it from you?”

  “From me?”

  “Yes. Can you send me a coupon?”

  “I’m not authorized to do that, I don’t think.”

  “Are you kidding me? You can’t send it? You’re the hot line—”

  “The what now?”

  “You are the redemption hot line—it says so right on my statement.”

  “Right. But we can’t send you a coupon.” [Long pause; some noises you can’t quite make out] “Sir?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can send you a coupon.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What’s your name…?”

  Four weeks later, you did indeed receive your free off-peak week rental coupon. You never used it, however; it was not possible for you to find an off-peak week to your liking. You never knew it before, but apparently you are not quite the individual maverick you fancy yourself to be: All your dreams of travel occur precisely when everybody else’s do.

  The coupon still sits in your closet at home. It’s on top of your stack of weight-lifting magazines.

  The End

  So you’re talking to Geraldo—not reciting all of the above, but trying to convey, in a moment, the flavor of your revelations. He is not buying it.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “you must be doing something wrong.”

  “Clearly.”

  “I mean, everybody loves those points.”

  “That’s why they’re worth nothing—because everybody loves them.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  You sit there a moment, feeling the silence. It is then that you make a truly terrible mistake: You take out your pen.

  “I figured out something,” you say, and start to write on a napkin. “Take something like Continental EasyPass—you need about fifty thousand miles to get a free round-trip. Say you go from New York to L.A., round trip that’s about five thousand g
ive or take. So you need ten round-trips from New York to L.A. to get a free round-trip.”

  “Huh…”

  “Without much early notice, it’s like six hundred dollars per trip, or six thousand for the ten of them. So you’re paying six thousand dollars for a free gift. And that’s the general rule—at least for the places like Continental where they actually do occasionally give away stuff. Some points things are totally illusion, but some are not—and the general rule seems to be buy ten, get one identical thing free. It’s like when you go to a coffee shop, with the punch card. But it only works with worthless things—like coffee and airplane seats. Buy ten worthless things at full price, get the eleventh on the house.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  Geraldo is still staring at your pen, the one you’ve been using to illustrate your insight. He’s not staring but staring—glaring. Then he looks up, and something has changed, changed utterly.

  “I better get back.”

  He stands and walks off toward the tray-dumping area. You sit there, bewildered.

  Bewildered, that is, until you glance down at the pen in your hand.

  It is a blue ballpoint pen with a gold tip and it says: RITZ-CARLTON.

  On-site Rule #4: Do Not Flaunt the 20 Percent.

  That is—20 percent is the standard amount added on top of professional fees for travel and other expenses. This amount can be considerable. For a new associate, 20 percent of a week’s billing rates is about $2,000, which should amply cover airfare, hotel, dry cleaning, team dinners, and a few twelve-minute adult films, plus the radio. But for a partner, assigned 50 percent to the job, expense reimbursement comes in at around $5,000 per week. That’s a lot of sushi.