Job Journal: Hotel Door/Bellman

The United States workforce is represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: those who plan on keeping their job for the long haul, and those who are biding their time before becoming the Next Big Thing. These are stories from the second group.

Job: Doorman/bellman at Upper West Side hotel

Duration: 3 months

Year: 2005

Previous Entry

One assistant manager, who had a random European accent and seemed very much like he should be assistant managing a boutique hotel in NYC, asked to talk to me one day. At this time I generally gave no shits about my appearance, so my hair was the longest it's ever been. He said "Colin, we like to keep a certain image here at the hotel and your hair, it is not fitting. Could you keep it a little neater?" Basically Alan Tudyk's "tighten it up" speech from Knocked Up, but with a sleazier accent.

So I complied. I went to my normal place, which happened to be the barber shop in the subway at Columbus Circle, since closed. At this point I had only had my hair cut in subway barber shops in the city. There was a young guy working and I got in his chair, told him to cut it down to 1/2 an inch on the sides & back and a little longer on the top. He trimmed up the sides and without changing the clipper guard zipped right up to the top. "Uh..." I said, knowing we definitely just trampled all over the point of no return.

"Oh shit man, I'm sorry."

"May as well keep going. Just even it all out." He did, and that took quite a bit less time than my usual, though of course I probably could have done it myself and saved $12. If I didn't have the face of a boy and the skull of a baby left on a mountainside to die, I would've been cutting my own hair all along. But I still tipped him. Low-wage workers of the world unite.

So I went from this:


To this:


I showed up at work the next day to many surprised comments from my coworkers. The manager told me that I had not in fact needed to cut my hair and that the assistant manager was, how do you say, talking out of his ass. Karma came around when the assistant manager was fired for trying to seduce a front desk girl who was hired the same time as me, in one of the rooms. She quit shortly thereafter.

Yaaaaay.

Colin Fisher is many things to many people, but mostly he's an actor and writer.