01 November 1999
My Week In The Real World - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
At my high school, they set aside all of last week for the grade 12’s to go on work experience. To the unknowing, to graduate from beautiful British Columbia, you need to amass a certain amount of hours spent in “real world”, observing and participating in, work of a field that may interest you. The field I chose some two years ago was Tourism, so it was off to the “real world” and travel agency Carlson Wagonlit.
Carlson Wagonlit, is a travel agency that has hundreds of branches across Canada. I was assigned to the 409 Granville branch, which is its corporate headquarters. So for mere mortals planning R&R, you’d have to go to another branch, because this branch is exclusively for the business traveller. I was booked in for my interview the Wednesday before my week and schlepped on a bus and tried to pull myself together. I met with the corporate supervisor who would serve as my supervisor, and I must admit I wasn’t nervous, but I was not at my best. I said ‘yeah’, instead of yes and hardly raised my voice, I could tell if this were a real interview, I would’ve been given the standard, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” line. Thankfully it was a school placement, and suffice to say, they took me in that next Monday.
I had expressed a great deal of anxiety and worry, because it was a huge office that had at least 50 employees. Agents were holed up in cubicles and had headsets on with the most telemarketer-sounding voices, I’ve ever heard. I was a little trepidatious about fitting in. I started on Monday doing data entry, and the clerical stuff they wouldn’t be able to hire anyone to do. It was a terribly fast paced office, and considering my future aspirations, felt like a news room. It had hundreds of printers, printing off thousands of sheets of paper throughout the day, voices on the phone, plus the keying in of info on keyboards that lay across the expansive first floor of this particular building.
By the end of the first day I was sending out E-tickets, batching tickets, sorting through ‘pinks’, filing and invoicing. If you don’t know what I mean, don’t worry, it’s all ticket agent lingo, that I still wonder if I’ve mastered. I learned how to use the office program that tracked everything from seat assignment, to how many rooms were empty for the second week in November at the Chateau Laurier; to the fax number to where all the pertinent particulars would be sent. Like any modern office, in any modern city, the office had an IT specialist on board, that tended to run around the office at the beck and call of everyone’s hard drive screwups. They had rooms that were stacked to high heaven with servers and printers, rooms that held nothing but travel brochures and filing cabinets at every corner.
The folks in the office were very nice. They listened, and gave clear and explicit instructions. The ladies I sat in with in the ticketing department had a riotous sense of humour. I enjoyed their conversations on everything from flu shots to Angie Dickinson. One lady was a die-hard hockey observer and could parlay the score from last night’s dreadful game, to what year Jacques Plante first introduced the goalie’s mask. I was in the ticketing department everyday, and noticed that they were a team. Like any team, getting along with your cohorts is of essence and they pulled it off splendidly. The department is plagued with immense time pressures, i.e.: printing and properly sending tickets off at a moments notice, sometimes meeting terribly close deadlines. I sat in with a group in charge of cruises, and they were a little younger, and you can tell, because office banter there was about the boyfriends they’ve got and talk like that. In the management area, where I spent a great deal of ‘hometime’, they talked mainly about the executive things in life: cleaning ladies and their kids’ rugby game. One manager was parlaying the day before’s situation at home, where her cleaning lady showed off her goods, following an upgrade from B-cup to D-cup.
The agents were a younger bunch. (They are in-charge of fielding the plans of their clients. And unlike other branch, this one deals exclusively with corporate clients that have contracts with the firm. So certain companies would call daily, booking and cancelling flights and reservations.) The average age, I would hesitantly guess was 30 plus. They were a raucous bunch that sounded so prim and proper on the phone, but once the call was finished, would curse at the inordinate amount of details they’d have to attend to. There was also the fair share of office gossip. You know, who’s doing who, where? No, sorry, but wouldn’t it really punch this piece up if there were?
Good office. Good people. The one thing that really got my attention and my thinking going was, that people skills are of the utmost importance. Especially in a field like this, but really in any field, when people are the most precious of resource, you have to know how to handle people. I enjoyed my week, and the brief but wholesome taste of life in the “real world”.
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