What the B&B Biz Really Comes Down To!

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The month we had spent at the Wild Rose Inn in Genoa taught us that one thing neither of had a problem with was getting along with strangers and making them feel welcome and at home as "guests" (not really the right word, since they pay for the privilege of living with us!).

We also learned at Sue's place that the money she was paying Jen ($25-$75 a day, with my services thrown in for free) in no way reflected the 12-14 hours a day it takes to stay on top of the job and do it really well. Sue had blatantly exploited Jenny, but the lessons we learned during her month in Europe were, in the end, priceless.

Oddly, we discovered that as smart and as pleasant as Sue usually was on the surface, she had quite a bit in common with the Brassers, chief among them an exasperated, put-upon air around the people who make reservations and pay the bills.

There is no doubt that Sue provided guests with a comfortable place to stay and an abundance of good food--no "one egg per guest" rule for her!--but she could sometimes be cold and impatient. We discovered in a very short time that B&B visitors can be annoying and demanding, but it does not take a whole lot of effort to keep reminding yourself how essential they are to every aspect of the business and cut them plenty of slack. Early on, I began playing a harmless little game, paying special attention to people who seemed tense or out of sorts and timing how long it would take me to thaw them out and relax them.

Jenny has a natural talent with strangers, honed during her years as a nurse and midwife in England, and I had had a lot of experience dealing with people who were not particularly happy to see me, because I had been a newspaper journalist for 40 years--on staff as a "hard news" reporter, then freelancing for more than 20 years in the U.S. as an entertainment industry feature writer.

As a reporter, you develop a thick skin and the ability to persuade people to give you what you need from them whether they want to or not. And even when I was helping promote the showbiz careers of actors and their acolytes, getting good material that had never been published before required the ability to make people like me and trust me even when to do so went against their better judgment!

So Job #1 was always making people feel we were happy to see them from the moment they stepped across the threshold, and providing them with whatever they needed within reason with good humor, a term that in my case has always meant making deliberately bad jokes and apologizing for them whenever absolutely necessary. It's not hard, because people don't choose B&Bs by accident--somewhere along the way, they found that Motel 6s and Holiday Inns were lacking what they needed and they chose to pay a little above the odds to get more personalized treatment in a close approximation of a private family home.

Most people are bound and determined to be happy with the choice they made and the one guest in a hundred who starts out miserable and stays that way despite an eager innkeeper's best efforts is usually pretty easy to work around. Looking back, I have always tended to think of an unhappy guest as a failure on my part rather than their own, and no one could ever accuse Jenny or me of being indifferent.

The clash between us and the Brassers at the Lord Mayor's Inn in Long Beach escalated into comedy by the end of our third month on the job, with Reuben and Laura staying away most of the time, but with Reuben creeping in several times a day unannounced, mostly to check on the thermometer inside the SubZero refrigerator in the kitchen. It certainly wasn't sub-zero (celsius!) when the old man had his way--I would turn the setting colder to guard against, primarily, sour milk and spoiled leftovers, and Reuben would tiptoe in and turn the dial the other way, ostensibly to "conserve electricity."

In the early days we had been made aware of a rule that we were not permitted to eat anything "belonging to the business" and so we were provided with a single shelf to store our private groceries, plus space in the door for my beer. Pretty soon, I began scratching my head at my sudden inability to keep track of how many bottles of Guinness and other "dark" beers I had on hand, a talent that had for years saved me from ever running out when I needed an evening tipple or two.

Laura remarked a few weeks into our LMI experience that anyone who drank even one beer every day was "clearly an alcoholic," and she also informed us that because Reuben was diabetic, he never touched alcohol and could not be expected to approve of its presence in the fridge. However, as long as the quantity did not get out of hand, big-hearted Reuben would be willing to work with us.

What was odd was that more and more often, I'd open the fridge door and say to Jen, "That's weird, I thought I had at least three beers left," or words to that effect, and I would bravely make do with the one or two that stood forlornly on the shelf. The truth (that I hadn't forgotten how to count or was going mildly mad) finally dawned on us one day when we came back from a break and found a pineapple cake Jenny had made ravaged as if by a wild (or at least very hungry) animal.

Why not just use a knife? we wondered. Laura blamed guests unknown, but that just didn't make sense. Rash and self-destructive behavior by someone long deprived of both sugar and beer was a much more sensible and sad explanation.
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