Las Vegas is a city that has its own set of rules and norms. When you check into a hotel in any other city, you get the room that you paid for. But Vegas is built on comps and kickbacks, and the room you end up in doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the one that you paid for. One method to getting a better room is to discreetly slip a twenty dollar bill to the clerk. Based on voluntary reporting by people who’ve tried it, it works 85% of the time.
I’m sitting in a suite at Bally’s right now. I booked the basic room, which cost around $30 per night, and included a $20/day food and beverage comp. I was upgraded, but I didn’t use the twenty dollar trick. These days I get upgraded about half the time. The upgrade I got on the room before this was very minor, I didn’t get one the time before that, but prior to that one I got a crazy suite with a jacuzzi in the bedroom and a separate living room.
My secret is to treat the checkin clerks like real people. It sounds simple, and your first thought might be that most people would do that, but that hasn’t been my observation.
We don’t have to interact with others so much, if we don’t want to. I used today’s twenty dollar food credit to order food from the Thai restaurant at Bally’s. Rather than simply walk downstairs or call them, I used the app TalkTo to type what I want and have them order it for me. Interactions between friends and family are also slowly becoming more and more abstracted, first from in-person to voice, and now from voice to text.
My guess is that the amount of face time we spend with others has decreased by half or more in the past few decades. As a result, we don’t practice in-person social skills as much, and critically, we don’t get negative feedback when we do something off-putting. It’s no coincidence that the aspects of social interaction that people tend to be bad with are those that aren’t necessary in digital communication.
For example, a huge number of people I meet simply don’t make eye contact. Common as this is, it astounds me every time. The rules for eye contact are simple: look someone in the eyes if you’re saying something to them or listing to them. If you are not doing this every time you talk to someone, you are doing it wrong. It’s okay to look away occasionally, especially during pauses in conversation, but eye contact should be maintained at least eighty or so percent of the time.
The worst form of not making eye contact is looking at your cell phone. If you can’t wait until after the conversation to check your instagram feed, turn your phone off.
Someone told me recently that I was a great listener. I thought that was funny, because I probably like hearing myself talk more than almost anyone, and I worry sometimes that I talk too much. Apparently everyone else is so poor at listening that I look good in contrast.
The most important thing I’ve learned about being a good listener is to give the other person plenty of opportunities to cut you off, and to never cut them off. If I begin to suspect that a conversation thread is getting boring to the other person, I’ll just stop talking about it. If they fill the space, they were bored. If they ask me to continue, they weren’t bored, so I continue. Being a good listener isn’t about caring about everything the other person says, but it is about respecting that they care enough about something to say it. You can also play a game with yourself, trying to ask questions you think the other person most wants to answer.
Social skills have eroded for many people, but that doesn’t have to include you. Make eye contact, put your phone away, and be a good listener. The change in how people, from friends to hotel clerks, react to you will be a day and night difference.
###
Photo is my room in Vegas. I’m not there anymore– now I’m on the island, doing small things like cleaning up the fire pit area, making trails better, etc.
Leave a Reply