Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 February 1875 — An Oblivious Hotel Clerk. [ARTICLE]

An Oblivious Hotel Clerk.

Curtis Guild writes as follows in the Commercial Bulletin: “An amusing illustration I must relate of the utter ignorance of an English employe of any detail of business outsidb of his own particular department, although the fact is frequently commented on by Americans. One would suppose that the clerk in the Great Northwestern Railroad Hotel in Liverpool, whose duty it was to register each guest’s name on arrival, assign him a room, and receive payment on departure, would insensibly acquire, from the very fact of observing arrivals and departures of guests, a knowledge of the hours of arrival and departure of trains, and more especially as her constant position (the clerk was a woman) was within a dozen feet of the great entrancedoor of the hotel into the station. But no; it was not her business to know, and she really knew nothing of the matter, as appeared by the following dialogue: ‘At what hour does the train from Chester arrive?’ ‘lf you ask the porter he will tell you.’ ‘But the porter is not here at present. Don’t you know whether there are any trains that arrive in the forenoon?! ‘l’m sure I can’t tell you, for trains be coming and going all day, and my business is to take travelers’ names on the book and assign them rooms. It is the porter as knows the trains’ time.’ ‘ But the incoming trains stop within a dozen rods of where you stand, and the traveler! for the hotels from them come first di rectly to you; you surely recollect whether you are accustomed to see any from Chester by morning trains?’ ‘Beg your pardon, I never took notice when they come. I knows there is'gentlemen from Chester comes here often. Sir Henry Bowring was ’ere once from Chester, but whether ’twas in the morning or afternoon I quite forget. The porter will tell you.’ I turned to the porter, who had now arrived, with the same question and got the following reply: ‘Chester, sir? Tell you in one minute,’ and he took down a wellthumbed ‘Bradshaw’s Guide,’ and after consulting its pages for about five minutes continued: ‘Yes, sir; three trains in forenoon, two in afternoon,’ giving the hour. Now the barmaid, to whom I first applied, acknowledged that she had held her position ‘ a matter of eighteen months,’ and the incoming trains actually jarred the room in which she stood, and yet she had not the slightest knowledge of their hour of arrival ‘ because it is the porter’s business, do you see?’ The porter himself was not up in the timetable sufficiently to answer without refreshing his memory, and yet this is a very large and generally well-kept house.”