Self-help gurus tell us we grow by "breaking out of our comfort zones" -- and yet few of us ever do.
After all, we are creatures of habit. We prefer the safety and comfort of what we know. Maybe this is why it is said that life repeats itself -- because we gravitate towards the familiar, over and over.
I've heard these clichés, of course, but was still surprised when my life really began repeating itself. It happened after I found myself trapped in a hotel -- a round, circular hotel at that, as if the very building itself were repeating.
Round hotels are rare, for many reasons -- the layout is odd, the round shape creates construction, acoustic, and repair issues. There are more reasons, like the room numbers go around in a circle and confuse the guests - and they are just a little weird to be in. That's probably why there are only a handful of round hotels.
There's that round hotel off the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, north of Westwood, below the Getty Center -- the Hotel Angeleno.
There's the Peachtree Westin in downtown Atlanta, a round 50-story building with a rotating restaurant on the top -- well, formerly rotating, as they turned off the rotation after a tragic accident you can read about online. Very sad.
And then there is the hotel where I was trapped, the Renaissance Center Marriott in Detroit. The "Ren-Cen," as it is called, is a round, soaring silver reflection over the Detroit River. Part GM offices, part hotel, the building sits sleek and tall, like a powerful spaceship on a launch pad waiting to explode.
I was in town on an unexpected consulting job when I became trapped there.
Sudden trips weren't unusual for me -- they are at the heart of my work, because I do odd jobs for corporations -- odd jobs that need a special touch.
Does your baby food company have a problem with broken glass in the strained peas?
Are you running a Pharma company with a drug that's developed an unforeseen side effect?
Are you an appliance manufacturer with a shocking safety problem?
Are the wheels coming off the bus?
If you find yourself in any of these situations you might be calling me.
Call me Corporate Handyman, Company Fixer -- call it what you will, but just call, because emails leave a trail and will get us both in trouble.
My work lives at the murky intersection of engineering, technology, law, public relations, and politics - an intersection that is never easy to slip through unscathed.
I don't claim to be an expert in everything -- I'm more like the navigator, plotting a course and relying upon a short list of expensive, discreet experts.
That's how I ended up in Detroit this past March.
I had been living quietly in my small apartment in New York when the phone rang. I was given the outline of the problem, I asked about a few particulars, and that afternoon was on a plane out of Newark Airport to Detroit, not sure when I'd be back -- my trips always lasted simply "as long as it takes."
This was one of the problems in my marriage -- my wife said she never knew when she'd see me again -- and she was right, leading to endless arguments until we both decided that "never" was probably the best answer for both of us. Then again, my trips were just one of many of the relationship issues we had, which together signaled that it was truly time to move on and strike out on my own.
By early March this year business travel was already slowing -- the plane to Detroit was three quarters empty, the Ren-Cen hotel lobby oddly quiet. The good news was that Marriott upgraded me to a suite on the top floor, putting me in a cluster of rooms three times the size of my apartment in New York, in a suite with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Detroit River and Windsor.
I didn't give any of this much thought, though -- I was immediately pulled into the client's problem -- starting at dinner that night with the company's top brass. My client was a major supplier to a car company, and had a messy safety-related issue.
That first night we worked until nearly midnight to pull documents, read multi-page lawsuits, and to quickly get up to speed, a working pattern that followed for weeks.
Every day we'd start over breakfast, and I'd end every evening at midnight, surrounded by stacks of paper in my hotel suite. I saw the headlines crawling by on the news channels, but was so busy that nothing really registered -- nor did I notice that the hotel crowd was thinning out day-by-day. In fact, I didn't notice much of anything until I got a note from the manager -- summoning me to appear in the Grand Ballroom at 8am the next morning.
I arrived at 7:55 am and saw about 20 other hotel guests already gathered -- sitting on chairs spaced widely apart in the enormous ballroom. It was now early April -- time had passed quickly by -- and Covid-19 had exploded while I was trying to salvage my client's business and reputation.
It wasn't just that the disease had taken over the country: New York was under a lockdown, and public health officials and companies were all scrambling to react.
The hotel manager informed us that they'd be closing this hotel in a matter of days. We all had to leave as soon as we could.
Of course, it wasn't that simple. Every hotel guest was in a different situation. Some of the guests lived "nearby" in Ohio and neighboring States, some were from places like Italy and China, and others were in the middle of business trips they were reluctant to cut short. The manager acknowledged that it would take a few days for all guests to "make arrangements," as he put it, so I knew I had some time.
It was nearly a week later when there was a knock on the door of my hotel suite -- the manager was back. His message was professional, courteous, yet unmistakable: "We're closing the hotel tomorrow and I'm sorry, you must leave now."
But it was too late.
The airlines had stopped flying, Hertz had stopped renting cars -- about to tumble into bankruptcy -- and New York had become a quarantine zone.
"As much as I'd like to leave, I can't. You wouldn't literally throw me out, would you?" I had been at this hotel a dozen times over the past two years, had earned millions of points with Marriott, and had met the manager before -- he had actually welcomed me as one of their "best customers" when I stayed at the hotel in January.
It turned out I wasn't the only one. There was another guest in the hotel, a Canadian parts supplier to American auto companies -- who had become stranded when the President closed the border. As I learned more I turned over the options in my head -- and proposed a solution.
"You'll need to keep the hotel ready to reopen" I told him. "Keep the lights on, run some of the machinery, secure the premises. We could do that -- no charge to you for taking care of things, and you don't charge us for staying here. Leave a task list, we can take turns, me and -- what's his name from Canada."
It took some convincing, but he agreed. They would drop food off at the hotel front door twice a week along with some fresh linens, and pick up the garbage and old sheets and towels. We'd be given a checklist -- things that had to be done daily, every other day, weekly. Once a week we'd have a conference call, give the manager the run-down, and report anything that was unusual.
Doug McKenzie was the name of the other stranded guest. He and I agreed on a system pretty quickly -- we divvied up the days, alternating, and we found that the "chores" didn't take more than a couple of hours a day. We agreed to meet in my hotel suite every night for dinner to compare notes about what we had found, what needed work, and any problems that had come up.
By early May it was clear that things in the outside world weren't getting better. In the meantime, our life in the hotel had become an oddly surreal kind of normal, the two of us living isolated in a giant hotel as if we were on an abandoned cruise ship, or a desert island. Every day was the same as the previous day, the hallways all looked the same, the food was pretty much the same, even our clothing was the same, washing and wearing the same few things we had traveled with over and over again.
The days were repeating, one identical to the day before. We were bored, and more than a little stir crazy.
"What do you miss most?" I asked Doug one night, as we ate a late dinner in front of the windows of my suite. "As far as myself, I never thought I'd say this, but I miss New York -- I mean, the City itself is a mess, the Mayor's a Putz, the streets are filthy, the homeless problem's out of control -- but the restaurants and museums and music, those I miss."
"What's a 'putz'?"
