Clever Is as Clever Does

A Lesson Learned from The Owners & Staff While Managing a Hotel in Africa:

Over the years, I have been truly blessed to have had one of the most incredible careers in the hospitality industry. Sometimes I have had the opportunity to work for a major hotel chain, while other times, I have worked for a much smaller, often family-owned property. Whether big or small, I have been able to travel to and live in some of the most beautiful and breathtaking places to be found in dozens of countries all over the world. I have also had the pleasure of working with some of the cleverest people you could ever hope to meet.

One of the most intriguing and mystical places I have ever worked was in what used to be called the “Dark Continent,” more currently known as Africa. The region I first worked in there had tribes where, while most members had converted to different religions, there were still a lot of people who believed in the “old ways,” even with continuing to practice some of the superstitious rituals of these old religions, like voodoo and black magic. Aside from it not being polite, you quickly learned not to ask too many questions about something that was as intriguing as it was frightening. What is that old saying? Ah, yes, curiosity killed the cat! Well, I learned to be a cautious, sleeping cat instead!

While some might say that these tribal people were backward in comparison to the rest of civilized society, what I learned was to simply admire the colorful, wildly diverse cultures of these wonderful people and I also developed a healthy respect for their marvelous, sometimes mysterious traditions and rituals.

Throughout my career as an international hotel general manager, I have always been amazed with the clever resourcefulness of the local people we hired. If there was a problem, they always found a simple, commonsense solution for whatever they needed. Necessity is the mother of invention and in some instances, like this one, it is also the mother of some very clever and uniquely inventive ways of doing things.

In this particular situation, I had just started working as the general manager of a mid-sized hotel in Africa and I soon found out that the owners were just as lovely and impressive as their hotel. I had seen the daily struggle the families of the local employees endured and what they all undertook to simply get water to their homes each and every day. Not only was it difficult to carry, but it was also usually warm and unappetizing to drink by the time they got home. Cold drinking water, which most of us take for granted, was an incredible luxury and sad to say, it was also a rare commodity here in Africa.

I soon found out I was not alone in observing this daily dilemma for our staff and their families. When the hotel owners found out about this problem, they installed an old, used but still functional, extra-large freezer in the hotel storage garage for any and all of the employees to use. The employees were shown how to fill a bunch of metal jerry cans, which were an early version of thermos containers, then freeze them so that when their shift ended, they had their “fill” of refreshing, frozen water to take back home without having to worry about spilling a single precious drop. It was such a simple thing to do, but what an incredible treat for the staff and their families!

About this time, I had been familiarizing myself with the bookkeeping side of this business. I was in the process of auditing our kitchen supply inventories when I noticed something that opened my eyes real wide. I had found a huge discrepancy with our cooking oil orders. We were purchasing more than double the amount of this expensive cooking oil than we were actually using, and it seemed to have been going on for some time now. A thorough and immediate inspection of the kitchen and restaurant areas showed nothing out of the ordinary, so I could only sit back and watch for any unusually furtive actions by any member of our staff. It can sometimes be very educational to just sit and quietly observe people, like the police do when they monitor someone’s criminal activity, but that just was not happening here.

This “wait and watch” stakeout routine of mine went on for several frustrating months but, even with a bunch of unannounced inspections, nothing was found and not one employee did anything that was suspect or out of the ordinary.

During one of our random “spot checks,” I decided to go back by myself and do another check on the freezer in the garage. The previous inspections had shown nothing but ice when we opened the jerry cans. This time it looked like another futile search, resulting in yet another dead end, but something kept bugging me, so I left a few of the jerry cans out, on top of the freezer. When I went back and reopened them, I spontaneously decided to turn them upside down and let the frozen contents slide out.

Imagine my surprise as I went down the line, inverting all of those now slightly thawed jerry cans. About every other one I opened revealed a “pretty,” but curiously two-toned cylinder of ice. Well, after a few minutes of closer inspection, I had one of those rare “aha!” moments Life sometimes gives us. They say clever is as clever does and when I finally figured out exactly what I was looking at, in my very own humble opinion, these staff members proved they were nothing short of brilliant! I realized I had finally found our “missing” cooking oil, which had kept giving us the “slip” for so long!

Several of the employees had ingeniously found a way to stock and further supplement their own home’s kitchen pantry inventory. They would carefully fill each of the metal canisters halfway with cooking oil and then they topped it off with water before putting them into the freezer. Since water and oil do not mix, the heavier water would settle to the bottom of the jerry can. When they added the less dense, lighter cooking oil, it would separate and float on top of the water. Once the jerry can was upside down and water was frozen, you would only see the frozen water on top when you opened the jerry cans, which is exactly what I saw during each of the previously fruitless searches.

Of course, this day no one claimed any frozen water jerry cans and there were no consequences for these slick oil thieves. I do not know how the news about my discovery spread, smoke signals, sounding drums, homing pigeons or simply the internet but everyone in the hotel was aware. Thankfully, we interrupted the syphoning of the hotel’s cooking oil. The generous and wonderfully compassionate hotel owners made sure to let everyone know that if the employees had an issue or specific problem, they were more than willing to not only listen but to also help them find a solution, so there was no need to steal from them.

Thanks to the caring and authentic largesse of these wonderful owners, we never had another problem with any supplies disappearing ever again! And these incredibly thoughtful owners proved to all of us that they were just as clever and as brilliant as their innovative staff!

Marwan Ragheb Copyright 2022