Slaughterhouse 48

(Written for a job application in 2001.)

START TIME: March 20, 1999
END TIME: April 30, 2001
WORD COUNT: 597

My proudest accomplishment in the field of information technology came with the project I moved to Las Vegas to be a part of: the opening of the Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas.

At the property that I transferred from, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Chicago, we had three Novell servers and one NT box. There were eight interfaces between the systems on the property. The preliminary plans for our new property in Las Vegas called for thirteen separate NT servers and Category 5 wiring to all of the guestrooms. There would be a network, strictly for the guests, that was already larger than anything I’d worked with before. All 424 rooms would be attached to their own network and hooked to their own t-1 line. We would have a t-1 line for our own network as well. The property I came from connected to the Internet with 56K modems.

The first day I arrived I met my new boss and our new assistant. We sat at a picnic table at trailers across the street from the Luxor and divvied up who would speak with which technology provider. It was three months before we would open.

Three months later, after countless 18-hour days, seven day weeks, dozens of meetings with vendors, providers, partners, and Mandalay Resort Group executives, even taking up residence in the hotel two weeks before it opened, we were ready. I was standing with 600 of my coworkers on a staircase, listening to our CEO say that Las Vegas would hardly knew what hit them. I was making last-minute changes to some front desk machines; the hotel would be open to invited guests at 5 PM. I completed the last-minute printer mappings at 4:50 PM and went back to my office.

The General Manager came by and shook our hands, complimenting us on having everything ready so fast. And then it got quiet.

The doors opened up at 5; everything was free until 9 PM. Dignitaries and VIPs were all over the lobby. Then I began to wonder: what was going to fail first? Would it be the property management system with the configuration that we had invented from scratch after the vendor told us we could only use three printers, rather than 27? Would it be the point-of-sale system that was interfaced to 27 outlets at Mandalay Bay as well as four entirely different point-of-sale brands? Would the timeclocks stop and all of the employees get paid hours of overtime they didn’t earn? Would the room key system fail? Would my E-mail system crash? Sales and catering? Everything I’d worked on and tested was now about to go live and purportedly run without a hitch.

At 8 o’clock, we weren’t getting any calls, and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I went up to my room. At 8:30, killing time until the systems went on for real, I called my wife. When I got off the phone, it was 9:15. I called Room Service and ordered a cheeseburger. Neither I, nor my assistant, nor my boss got a single call all night. All of the systems worked precisely as advertised.

The next day the CEO said it was the smoothest opening he had ever seen. When I got E-mail from my friends the next day, asking how crazy was it and did everything hold, I told them, “I got to watch it on television, same as you did.”

That right there, that I wasn’t busy saving a hotel from chaos on opening night because of careful planning, extensive testing and hard work, is my proudest technological accomplishment.