Sledgehammer Sturm und Drang
If anyone is looking for a replacement for your run of the mill alarm clock, I would propose moving to the student center where I have lived for the past three months. With any luck you can be awakened to a sledgehammer serenade at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. You will enter the hall and be greeted with a scene out of a crack house as nearly every one has moved out (“except you, sucka’”) and crews are busy deconstructing every single thing screwed down or affixed.
You will have told one of the managers (or whoever it was that took my money!) not a week before that you were staying until July 1st, and she will tell you at that time that unless you stay later and pay more you cannot move to one of the already remodeled buildings.
You will return that afternoon to find that water is leaking through your bathroom ceiling from the handy sledge work of the morning (that’s still continuing in full swing). You will try to put on your friendliest face, because anger at the haphazardly managed building closing won’t accomplish anything. (While I was waiting the week before, another guy was so pissed off by the front desk blithely ignoring his requests in Chinese that he threw their brochures all over the floor.)
You will get the manager to move you to the new building without a sorry, and on the way to your new room, she will tell you with a straight face, “By the way, this room is 5 kuai (sixty cents) more a day.”
Now, to give her the benefit of the doubt, I probably wasn’t the first request of a long, long day, and maybe she had no idea what “water is leaking from the ceiling” means even with effusive body language. If I worked for her salary, I probably would’ve cackled, “Yeah sixty more cents you spoiled, atonal-Chinese-speaking American bastard.”
But if those explanations are wrong, I wonder if it’s just that the management hierarchy is different. The person at the top sets everything up, and doesn’t expect any independent judgment on the part of underlings. Also, there’s a built-in reluctance to criticize due to the concept of “losing face” which may lead to feedback impedance, along with little incentive to make things better.
Maybe I’m just used to high levels of customer service, so that it seems anomalous why management couldn’t see the contribution of word of mouth and word of bad mouth to their bottom line. Or maybe they can, and they calculate that is more profitable not to do anything about it.
(For you who have come by way of search engines out there, I stayed at the Beijing Foreign Student Activities Center. It has been livable, but like everything else in China you may have to adapt to different ways of getting what you need done and be more persistant.)
You will have told one of the managers (or whoever it was that took my money!) not a week before that you were staying until July 1st, and she will tell you at that time that unless you stay later and pay more you cannot move to one of the already remodeled buildings.
You will return that afternoon to find that water is leaking through your bathroom ceiling from the handy sledge work of the morning (that’s still continuing in full swing). You will try to put on your friendliest face, because anger at the haphazardly managed building closing won’t accomplish anything. (While I was waiting the week before, another guy was so pissed off by the front desk blithely ignoring his requests in Chinese that he threw their brochures all over the floor.)
You will get the manager to move you to the new building without a sorry, and on the way to your new room, she will tell you with a straight face, “By the way, this room is 5 kuai (sixty cents) more a day.”
Now, to give her the benefit of the doubt, I probably wasn’t the first request of a long, long day, and maybe she had no idea what “water is leaking from the ceiling” means even with effusive body language. If I worked for her salary, I probably would’ve cackled, “Yeah sixty more cents you spoiled, atonal-Chinese-speaking American bastard.”
But if those explanations are wrong, I wonder if it’s just that the management hierarchy is different. The person at the top sets everything up, and doesn’t expect any independent judgment on the part of underlings. Also, there’s a built-in reluctance to criticize due to the concept of “losing face” which may lead to feedback impedance, along with little incentive to make things better.
Maybe I’m just used to high levels of customer service, so that it seems anomalous why management couldn’t see the contribution of word of mouth and word of bad mouth to their bottom line. Or maybe they can, and they calculate that is more profitable not to do anything about it.
(For you who have come by way of search engines out there, I stayed at the Beijing Foreign Student Activities Center. It has been livable, but like everything else in China you may have to adapt to different ways of getting what you need done and be more persistant.)
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11:59 AM
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