Yesterday evening, I went to a five-star hotel in Kochi to cover a press junket. Five-star hotels are like an alternate dimension—eerie Stanley Kubrick-style corridors and strange carpets. I waited for an hour for everyone to arrive and, in the meantime, struck up a conversation with a hotel employee.
The employees at a five-star hotel are part mannequin when it comes to guests. They look you straight in the eye, like a bouncer, but the moment you point to the steel teapot and complimentary cookies, they become a genie you’ve enslaved. A hot cup of tea is served without a single word of dialogue.
Anyway, I asked him some rat-race questions. "How many hours do you work?"
"If you're lucky, you can stop at 14," he didn't stutter. "Well, 12 hours is the shift time, but 14 is considered fair to approach the manager and say you're leaving."
"This culture is the same with every upscale hotel brand," the neatly dressed, short-haired, politest guy in the room added before returning to his designated corner.
The first proper job I had was at a leading Malayalam language newspaper. I was posted in Kochi, one of its busiest bureaus—not because I’m smart, but simply because I lived close by.
If you're working in a newspaper as a journalist, your schedule is very much like that of the hotel management guy at the five-star hotel. You show up early in the morning, loiter a lot, and no matter how quickly you finish your work, you cannot leave at 6 PM.
The funny thing is, people won't log off even if there's not much to do because they fear being culture-shamed.
I transitioned from that business and am still doing something similar. Yes, I still stretch my hours to get things done if it's super important, but I have no qualms about leaving at my log-off time. I have acquired the power not to feel embarrassed about anything that stops me from watching that sunset I planned.
#hustle #workculture
