Resort

For lack of a better word, I guess? I'm talking about Boreal Mountain Resort, where we've been skiing for the past three days. It's not a resort where you have a hotel room and you can shop in an outdoor mall midway up a mountain and there are thirteen options for lunch. A place like that is five times as expensive as Boreal, which is right off Interstate 80 and relatively inexpensive and which offers a good variety of runs, mountain peak beauty and caters particularly to snowboarders and beginners. It's a fine place for children (and adults) still finding their confidence on sticks and planks sliding down mountain slopes in very low double digit temperatures.

I'm not much of a skier—that is, I'm a decent skier with no desire to be challenged much by it—and my wife is an expert, having been up and on skis from age four and ever after. But I love being high up on these mountains, with a view, or in heavy weather; it's exhilarating. I don't need to throw myself off the mountain (which is how I tend to describe what Kim does for fun on these trips) to have a good time. I like to go a little slow, a little fast, remain in control and enjoy the scenery. The kids are having fun, too; Oscar in particular loves to ski and on this trip has been having a great time, being adventurous and skiing confidently—it's beautiful to see. Harry is at a less confident time, though he still does perfectly well on the greens. I do those with him but will sometimes venture into a blue run.

I'm prefacing in this manner because we are people who enjoy this activity overall and are choosing to do this (it wouldn't be Harry's first choice, but he's game for just about anything). We have been to a number of other ski resorts. I skied in Maryland—and Iowa! And several places around Tahoe. Kim's skied the state of Oregon and several places around Tahoe. We have also been to places like Disneyland and Legoland and endless museums, amusement parks and other venues erected for the benefit and distraction and maybe even exercise of children and adults. Places like zoos. Airplane museums. Skating rinks. Choo-choo trains. We all know these places.

We all have certain expectations about these places. We're going there to do a thing, see a thing or a bunch of things, experience an activity—in this case, sliding down a mountain on sticks and planks, ideally in a stylish way but more likely in a barely-remaining-upright way—because it's fun and it's outside and whateverthefuck. How do I know? If I've learned one thing by visiting "resorts" like Boreal, it's that I understand very little about human nature, in fact; whatever I thought I knew or could rely on, I saw, would quickly be tested, possibly overturned entirely, but without the benefit of understanding. I would have the evidence of my own eyes—not to mention the weight and power of my Goggles of Privilege, which led me to suspect, in the first place, that things were awry—but little ability to interpret what I saw.

It's easy to catalog the ways in which human beings annoy each other in mass situations, like ski resorts, in the sense that a long list can quickly be created. It all boils down to “people are inconsiderate pigs," particularly once there are enough people in a place or at an event. But there are so many ways this manifests, it boggles the mind. From blocking doorways because you're just standing there to throwing trash anywhere you feel like it to spraying diarrhea across a toilet seat like a graffito and then just leaving it there, there is a whole range of behaviors that, on paper, every single human knows are unacceptable. Yet, once a certain amount of people are present in an environment, even the most genteel citizen feels justified behaving like a piece of shit because "when in Rome" or some stupid thing. I don't know why, but I know it happens because I am a person, too, and I am also susceptible to the Well, clearly no one gives a shit, so why should I? line of thinking.

This certainly happened to me at Boreal—by day three I was simply strategizing for how to get what I and my family needed by any means necessary and a big FUCK YOU to anyone standing in our way for any reason. You quickly see how this kind of culture emerges. Lots of people at a cheaper California ski resort means lots of different types of people, diverse in many ways, and in many ways that we don't even normally consider diverse (like having all kinds of subgroups of white people who would never interact otherwise) and it is a stressful situation to have so many types in one place. It's a massive clash of class, culture, education and politics—and race, though there's less diversity there because of the type of activity involved, a traditionally super white activity.

Now, if you run a ski resort with this kind of very broad clientele compared with, say, Heavenly or Palisades, which are stupidly expensive and maintain the reputation of winter sports as pastimes for the rich, you have some choices to make. You can take an antagonistic stance toward your customers, subjecting them to every kind of tiny inconvenience you can conjure out of the collective incompetence of your staff and management, or you can attempt to deliver on a common sense approach to customer service that truly considers the whole experience.

Clearly, and unfortunately, Boreal has chosen the former. Ski resorts are famous for employing foreign youths in many low level positions, from the food service to the lift monitoring, which is a cool program when you train the employees well. When you train them poorly, it's predictably disastrous; this extends, too, to the roles generally not given to foreign kids but local kids, like the ski rental department. For example, the cafeteria at Boreal gives guests the choice of waiting in an interminable line to order food, and then interminably waiting for that food to be made, or using an app that allows you to order online and show up when your food is ready. Sounds good; except that the kids filling each order simply don't know how to do that and their management clearly has no idea how to organize them to do so. The effect is that, for example, on our first day we waited one hour and thirty minute for our food to be "ready," then, when the time arrived, I still had to talk to staff to have them actually assemble my order; the whole process took almost two hours. Worse, it was clear that many people who ordered considerably after we did were getting their meals first—an indication that the staff (especially the management) have no concept of traffic management in a cafeteria which, outside the trapped-with-no-other-choices ski resort environment, would lead to a restaurant no longer existing. By the third day, we had figured out how to game this system to achieve our desired results—but this didn't do anything for everybody else in line.

Or, my favorite example, the electronic gates. Boreal has installed a number of electronic gates that respond, in theory, to the RFID chip in a plastic card you get to show that you paid money and bought a lift ticket. They give you the card, but nothing to put it in—such as a tag you could hang from your zipper, like the old paper lift ticket system—so you put it in your pocket. Then, when you enter the resort you pass through a gate that will either sense your card immediately, or require you to hump the gate with the part of your snowsuit secreting the card until it works, or is broken. Once you enter the lodge area, you have to go through another electronic gate with your card to gain access to the ski area, with the exact same range of results. THEN, to take one of the main lifts, you have to enter through an electronic gate AGAIN, and again, the possible outcomes are very much indeterminate. Three gates to get on a lift which is a hassle even when the gates work—but when they don't it's an aggressively anti-customer inconvenience, presumably to not lose money from fence-jumpers. I get that, but I am burning with curiosity to know how much money the resort actually lost every year to freeloaders before this system was put in place, a system riddled with holes even before the technical issues. To attempt to prevent stealing, a paying customer has to pass through THREE separate gates, all of which might fail at any moment, simply to gain access to the thing they paid for. Paying customers are punished for being paying customers.

If you complain about this, the only people to complain to are the Argentine or Chilean or Bulgarian kids who happen to be standing by the gate, who all immediately respond with variations on We didn't put the gate there or We don't know why it's there or Don't blame us or whatever; which suggests management doesn't give a shit and just lets the kids handle such gripes in their untrained, uninformed way. If I was one of those workers, I also would come to view customers as the enemy—after all, they're the ones whining about minor inconveniences that you can't do anything about.

The same indifference to customer inconvenience applies to trash, bathroom cleanliness, mask-wearing and the ski rental process. I also saw other effects. Harry, who loves to play in the snow more than skiing, found a spot where a bunch of kids were playing on day two. It was atop the snow where it was plowed up from the big walkway from the parking lot. The next day, that same area had been fenced off, clearly to prevent children from playing in the snow there. This is antagonism to the customer—children in this case. The argument—I guess, because of course no argument was actually made to anyone—is probably a combination of "the children were going to make us have to sweep this area free of snow again" and "legal liability," both fucking nonsense in customer service terms. They put those concerns first and, like all of the other little inconveniences, bit by bit make your day shittier. There's no incentive to do otherwise, because they have a monopoly on a piece of land and the use of that land—if anyone wants to ski or snowboard there, they have to put up with all of it or fuck off. It's a disgrace from the point of view of hospitality. But, in this arena, it's just the cost of being a paying customer.