Fix the sound of the ocean

A guest at the hotel I ran in Mexico once asked me to fix the sound of the ocean.

I'm not joking. She said the waves were too loud at night and could we do something about it. I was in my twenties, running guest experience for a property on the Yucatan coast, and I had no script for that one.

What I wanted to say was that the ocean is not a feature request.

What I actually did was sit with her for a few minutes. It turned out the ocean was fine. She'd gotten a phone call right before the trip, the kind that follows you onto a vacation, and the waves were just the thing her brain had landed on. We moved her to a room facing the garden. She slept. She thanked me on the way out like I'd done something clever.

I think about that a lot now that I build software instead of running hotels.

People rarely hand you the actual problem. They hand you the version of it that's easiest to point at. The loud ocean. The feature that's "confusing." The teammate who's "not communicating." The real thing is usually a question or two underneath, and it's almost never what they walked in saying.

The whole job, hospitality or product, is being willing to ask the second question. Most of the work I'm proud of came from not taking the first answer.

Fifteen years apart, same skill. I just trade in different rooms now.