Sylvia's Journal

I was given a tri-fold on expensive paper and with a fancy design that did not quite work. It looked more like a computer punch card. Of course the person who designed this card was probably born long after punch cards disappeared. I was asked to answer the questions and tell the marketing department about the quality of my very short stay in the hotel. It included items such as ‘How would you describe your experience in the elevator while going to your hotel room?’ with two blank lines for my concise answer. I was also asked whether I had noticed a change in the lobby environment between night and day and what my impression was of the scent in the entrance. Nothing was left out, even the art on the room key was pointed out to me; what was my impression? The whole thing was about how the hotel had affected my senses. Business schools and sales gurus have been telling us for years that selling services was all about ‘the experience’ that a company triggers in its customers. It finally trickled down into the evaluation forms (no longer called evaluation forms but comment cards.)

At midnight I was zipped to the airport in a chauffeured limo with the young desk clerk accompanying me in the passenger seat and me sitting in the back. That deserved a big tip of course which comes in handy with the Eid holiday I am sure.

Unlike Terminal 3, the departure hall for all the non-Emirate long haul flights was filled with people, albeit it mostly non-Moslems I suspect. The Moslem world, at least those who can afford to, is staying put and celebrating, especially that late into the night. The flight departed at 2 AM.

Although the plane was not as empty as my flight from Dhaka I did not need to share my row of three seats with anyone else so I stretched out and slept the entire trip (6 hours), waking up somewhere over Eastern Holland when breakfast was served.

One row in back of me were the two Dutch participants who I had met during the conference and who had disappeared on the last day. As it turned out they had, with other visitors from their project, driven all the way to Chittagong, a journey of several thousand kilometers.

Their project trains traditional village doctors in recognizing signs of mental illness and they visited a few en route and opened a training center. She wore two shiny pretend (she hoped) gold bangles that were pressed on to her friends after she had admired them on a newlywed’s arm. She was still annoyed with herself to have made such a stupid remark. You have to watch out what you admire. I think I have made that mistake a few times as well and ended up with stuff I actually did not really like. It is of course a trap set by being dishonest.

And now, onwards to home.