AN INSI DE JOBIn four hours there will be

180 people at this pool. For now it’s just Errol (page 58).

S T O R Y B Y R O B E R T S T E P H E N S P H O T O S B Y M A T T D U T I L E

TO FIND THE REAL SECRETS BEHIND THE ALL-INCLUSIVE EXPER IENCE, WE GO WHERE NO GUEST WANTS TO GO: TO WORK.

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< ainsleybutler supervisorA landscaping job during the con-struction of Sandals Whitehouse led to an interview with the resort manager in 2005. “He saw I was easygoing and asked if I’d heard of butler service. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but jobs were scarce. This one changed my life.”

sareikaconcierge hostess

Worked in her grandmother’s restaurant while growing up. She greets new arriv-als. “Long travel days can make people grumpy. But I learned from grandma that the guest is always right. There’s no one here to fight with.”

mr. millergeneral managerGrew up in Kings-ton learning hard work from his mom (catering) and dad (farming). “No one can fake a smile every day. We hire attitude and train skill. My grand-mother taught me a proverb that I think about often:

‘A gentle word turns away wrath.’”

The busiest restaurant at the Sandals Resort in Whitehouse, Jamaica, is nowhere in sight. To get there I have to pass the crowds at Giuseppe’s, Jasmine’s and Eleanor’s, and find a foot-worn path that none of the resort’s 720 guests will

ever notice. At the end of that path is a humid cafete-ria with small windows near the ceiling desperately directing air in and out. The place is called Nyammings, slang for “eat,” and eat is just what the resort’s 650 employees, or “team members,” do here in privacy. Today’s special is a Nyammings exclusive: rice and cow heel. Team members are eating, resting and occasion-ally looking up at the guy who must be lost: me.

Understand, resort guests have eight places to dine, and Nyammings isn’t one of them. And let’s just state the obvious: The tall white guy sure looks like a guest. But for the next four days I’m crossing the line. I am at Sandals to work. Six uniforms, six jobs

IT MUST BE OBVIOUS I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING BECAUSE THE HUSBAND ASKS, ALMOST OUT OF SYMPATHY, “DO YOU WORK HERE?”

Butler is a coveted job because tips are openly accepted. It

isn’t what you think, though. “We’re like swans,” one butler says. “On the sur-face we glide, but

underneath we’re in constant motion.”

and a hunger to find out what it’s like on this side, the serving side, of the all-inclusive experience.

As I slide my dirty tray over to the dishwashing team, I take another long look at one of the many mottos on the walls behind the scenes: “Watch your attitude. It’s the first thing people notice about you.”

ima butler. no, that is not a typo. it was the maiden name of my dad’s mother. My family always thought it was so unique. Ima Butler. Little did I know that one day (today), I would make an effort to live out grandmamma’s name: I’m a butler.

My supervisor, Ainsley, is all business when I meet him in uniform at 9 a.m. He’s phoning in an order for papaya and champagne that he will pick up for a guest in exactly one hour. Ainsley gives me a visual MRI.

“Where’s your belt?” he asks softly. “Funny story, I meant to bring one …”“What’s that, a bracelet?” he asks. “Oh, yeah. My daughter made it for me.”“Put it away. And lose the bow tie. It’s too hot.”It’s going pretty well so far. Like most Jamaicans, Ainsley speaks in first gear.

He has no crease in his brow or anxiety in his step. But I do notice that while he instructs me, he’s constantly looking around. “Never say ‘yes ma’am’ or ‘yes sir.’ We want the guest to relax. It’s ‘most definitely’ or ‘cer-tainly.’ And there is no such thing as a problem. There are only opportunities to make things better.”

No problem. They are the most common words spoken in Jamaica, and at a venue where people from around the world will complain about waiting for their beach umbrellas to be raised, the best way to keep one’s cool is to say it out loud: No problem.

Ainsley pulls out a lighter. “You have a fire starter?”That’s a problem. It must be next to my belt.

“A bottle opener?” Ima Terrible Butler. Real butlers go through 2½ months of training.

I’m trying to get this in four hours. “Very important,” says Ainsley, who was looking for

a landscaping position in 2005 and wound up almost as surprised to be a butler as I am. “We want maxi-mum contact, minimum intrusion with the guest.”

“Can you be more specific?” I ask. Oh, yes. Yes, he can. “OK, for example, this

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shanice >pastry specialistHelps her father at the family’s farm store on her days off from Café de Paris. The proximity of the pastry shop to the resort’s giant pool bar makes this the busiest place on the property at midday. “We know how to have fun instead of getting flustered. It isn’t in our blood.”

damionbutlerWhen he wasn’t fishing or milking cows growing up, he was learning how to host feasts with 40 or more people at his aunt’s home. “When I first meet a guest, I’m looking for a scar or a tattoo or any permanent physical characteristic, so I always remember their name.”

karaleeentertainment

Was hired when she came to the resort as part of a visiting dance troupe. Home is 90 minutes away, so she lives in housing on site that’s set up for team members who work split shifts. “The most challenging time is right after lunch, when we’re trying to get guests into activities, away from the pool bar.”

morning I know that you walked from the fitness center to the coffee shop. You carried two cups of coffee out. You talked with Errol at the side of the pool. And then you went back to your room.”

My smile is now held in place by nerves. I dumped one cup of coffee in the grass. I might have picked my ear too. Ainsley knows everything.

His phone vibrates. One of his guests wants a hair-cut. It’s Sunday. Ainsley calls his personal barber and asks him to open his shop in the village as a favor, then turns me over to shadow another butler, Damion.

Ainsley is gone before I can ask: Who goes on vaca-tion and asks a butler for a haircut?

I follow Damion up three flights of stairs for a bet-ter view. “I love this part of the job,” he says. From up high we can turn and look in the general direction of Whitehouse, where typical wages are $50 to $90 a week. Or we can face the beach and see two of Damion’s guests in the distance. He can tell their drinks are half empty, and from the color he knows they’re dirty bananas. Five minutes later we’re delivering another round of dirty bananas to the surprised couple.

“They’ll be occupied for a little while,” says Damion. Which means we have time to go to their room and shape their bath towels into dogs. “I found out they have a dog at home, and they miss her.”

Maximum contact. Minimum intrusion.“You were made to be a butler,” I say to Damion.“Actually,” he says, “I started in pastry. I worked

there for two days before this job came up.”At the end of my shift, not quite fired and definitely

not hired, Damion asks where I’m headed next. I look at my schedule. “Café de Paris,” I say. The pastry shop.

every so often i wake up from a dream where I’ve shown up to work in my underwear. A stress dream, my wife calls it. The moment I walk into Café de Paris, I feel like I’ve forgotten my pants.

A midday crowd has formed in front of a display case of individually portioned pecan rolls, blueberry cheesecakes ... a buffet of buzzes. The cafe serves 500 plates a day, more than any restaurant on the prop-erty (not counting Nyammings) because don’t we all crave sweet snacks after spending six hours drinking at the pool, especially when they’re free?

Denese, one of the young ladies maintaining con-trol behind the counter, motions me over to a hot circular griddle. “Have you ever made a crepe?”

Let me think. No. In the audience of four hungry resort guests, Denese gives me a two-minute lesson on ladling, massaging, flipping, filling and …

“Excuse me, could we get two Italian coffees?”A lady and her husband are looking at me. It must

be obvious that I’m no more versed in Italian cof-fee than I am in crepe making, because the husband, almost out of sympathy, asks, “Do you … work here?”

During this humbling exchange, Denese has fin-ished the crepe and now she has horrific news. “My shift is over.” The stress dream begins. I stand behind the crepe machine to hide my groin.

For the next four hours sunburned guests ask for more than they should (really, two cheesecakes and three chocolate puff pastries?) and order ice-cream drinks that sound like LinkedIn contacts you’ll never actually meet (Alexander Freeze).

The pastry kitchen team of 13 will go through 120 pounds of sugar and nearly 200 pounds of flour today. When I ask my new teammate, Shanice, if she can take any leftovers home, she shakes her head as if I’ve asked whether we can eat off our shoes.

“We can eat in the back, away from the guests. But everything that’s left goes into containers.” She means the garbage. “I don’t like to see food thrown away, but I love to make people happy.”

Four unhappy and hungry people are waiting for crepes. A lady from Ukraine studies my technique and looks up at my name tag. “Have you ever done this?”

“I’ve been doing this since 3 o’clock,” I say.Any hint of humor is lost in a light smoke filling

the shop. It’s coming from the griddle. My crepe. I use a long spatula to pull the blackened dough off the

THE MINUTE I WALK INTO THE CAFE, I FEEL LIKE I’VE FORGOTTEN MY PANTS. FOUR UNHAPPY AND HUNGRY PEOPLE ARE WAITING FOR CREPES.

griddle and hold it at arm’s length like a dirty diaper. Then comes the walk of shame. Around the display case. Past the guests. To the trash. Feeling very naked.

i’m running late for work. not that anyone will notice. The man raking the beach at sunrise — it has to be the loneliest job at the resort. By the time I

More than 10,000 eggs and 600 pounds of melon hit the loading dock weekly. About 1,000 pounds of flour go to the pastry kitchen. Leftovers find a special place.

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< errolpool manNever knew his father growing up and wants to provide for his wife and three daugh-ters. He wakes up every morning at 3:30 to get to work and clean the pool (and has never been late in nine years).

“The pool is like a plant. It needs to be nurtured with TLC.”

shamoneybartenderThe job came at a great time in her life. Five years ago, at 17, she had to start taking care of her brother and two sisters.

“Working here has allowed me to provide for them and to set a good example in a tough family situation.” o.b.water-sports managerStarted at another Sandals property raking the sand, where he once saw a beached whale. He now coordi-nates an average of 60 snorkeling guests and 60 dive guests daily. “Know what? I still like to pick up the rake when it’s quiet.”

arrive down near the ocean, my trainer, Dwayne, has been beautifying the sand for two hours.

“It’s the best time of the day,” he says.It will stay this way, quiet, until 9 a.m., when all

of Dwayne’s turf has to be as perfect as a vacuumed rug. And then it will be trampled.

“I’m not sure I get this, Dwayne,” I say. Truthfully, I can think of few places where I’d rather be than in the shade of sea-grape trees, 10 feet from the sleepy Caribbean Sea. But still, raking sand?

“We want it to look nice,” he says. “But it’s also the sand flies. Their larvae are under the surface. We rake them to the top so the sun will bake them away.”

Some of the guests will get baked too. And that’s when the most serene job at Sandals has its moments, after the bars open. “Alcohol can change people,” Dwayne says, calm as the surf. “But it’s no problem.”

We dig holes to bury the leaves and seaweed. Rake and dig. Rake and dig. I’m not sure how much time has passed when I hear a voice coming from the walkway.

“Mr. Miller wants to see you.” Uh-oh. Courtney Miller. The general manager. My boss.

honest, i didn’t take any leftovers from the cafe. And even though my alarm didn’t go off, I made it to the beach on time. It turns out Mr. Miller doesn’t want to fire me, yet. He wants to make sure I understand a few things about where I’m working.

“What you see here? At the resort? It is natural for us. Serving. It is what we do in our homes in Jamaica.”

I mention how hard it is to make sense of that when the only thing standing between indulgence and poverty is a long entrance drive.

“Sometimes it’s hard,” Mr. Miller says. “The need is so great in the community, it can be paralyzing. We have to see it as an opportunity to help.”

Courtney’s heart is as soft as his voice. I’ve heard stories of his personal giving in Whitehouse, so much so that he’s sometimes referred to as “the mayor.”

“There are letters on my desk from people asking for jobs or help. We do all that we can possibly do.”

One last question. “What do I need to work on?”Mr. Miller looks at me. “Your Jamaican accent.”

true story. a lady walks up to neptune’s bar. Orders a mojito. Watches the new bartender look for mint or a glass or anything related to mojito making.

“Are you … from here?” she asks.Everyone at the bar is privately asking the same

thing. I’ve been seeing it in faces all week. “Is he from here? Does he really work here?” It’s OK. The quizzi-cal responses are due to my not being Jamaican (more than 95 percent of the team is hired from the area) and not being competent (what’s a Jamaican Smile?). So while my bar supervisor, Shamoney, balances a stack of 40 cups on her nose for entertainment, I’m drawing nothing but foam into a beer glass.

It’s a mystery to me how Shamoney keeps her cool. Guests at the resort consume 130 kegs of Red Stripe and 200 bottles of Appleton’s Rum every week. And there she is, walking around the bar with a bottle on her head and mixing icebergs and coconut kisses.

“This job changed my life,” she says while we pre-pare 30 rosemary gin fizzes in back of the bar. “I have

The beach has to be manicured and rid of sand flies by 9 a.m., when guests claim their territory. The main pool (until recently the biggest one in Jamaica) will need 600 towels neatly rolled and stacked so they can be yanked back out.

THE NEED IS SO GREAT IN THE COMMUNITY THAT IT CAN BE PARALYZING. WE HAVE TO SEE IT AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO HELP.

the real whitehouseThe settlement of Whitehouse is an hour south of Montego Bay, with a population of about 4,000. Because Sandals does not hire from abroad (except for certain chefs), the team is virtually all Jamaican. Sandals, founded in Jamaica, is the largest private employer in the Caribbean (more than 13,000 team members).

< kenoijunior conciergeOnly 22 years old, he has worked here for four years and is paying his way through pharma-ceutical school. “I have to work harder because I don’t want a student loan. My mother had it tough. When I get married, I want to be debt-free, and to have a better situation for my wife and kids.”

the next teamFunds donated by guests at checkout have helped build or improve nine area schools and clothe the kids. Every Thursday, guests have an opportunity to take a ride into the community with school supplies. The trip usually includes loud singing and ends with louder soccer games.

to keep my cool, and my job, so I can provide for my siblings. My boss believes in me. I’m taking leader-ship training classes so I can be a manager someday.”

A guy from Ohio calls out for “something special.” Shamoney looks at me. “You do it. I believe in you.”

With that I start speaking fluent Jamaican. “No problem.” I draw Red Stripe into a glass, no foam, and slide it over. “It’s called Bubbly Jamaican Honey.”

Shamoney still has to guide me through the mix-ing of Miami Vices and Bob Marleys, but I’m taking the advice that Mr. Miller gave earlier when I asked,

“How do you make 720 people feel special?”“One at a time,” he said.

the picnic basket feels pretty good in my hand. Much more stable than the silver platter I carried around during butler duty (by the way, champagne makes a stain when it spills onto the sidewalk). On this night I’m a concierge. It’s one step down from butler service, so I’ve had a little training. When I take bottled waters to one room, the man and wife are grateful, curi-ous, and not entirely satisfied. “Actually, we wanted ice.”

“Certainly,” I say. “Please accept the water as well.”On the boardwalk a couple from Quebec asks if I

know where they might find some chocolate. “Most definitely. Café de Paris is that direction. You can get Nutella in your crepe. Don’t overdo it, though.”

That’s one problem I can’t overlook at an all-inclusive: waste. The endless breakfast buffets. The never-ending fruit tarts. Whatever goes uneaten will go down the corridor past Nyammings, across the loading dock where 3,000 pounds of chicken and 900 pounds of pineapple will arrive this week, and land behind a wall with the most appropriate motto of all painted on it (“Give the customer more than he or she expects”), at the feet of Robert Carpenter.

“The resort saved my business,” Robert tells me during a break on the Venetian Plaza. He’s a pig farmer. When the price of feed went from $276 a bag to $1,500 in nine years, all but one of Robert’s friends had to give up their farms. He thought of getting out too, until Sandals offered its leftovers.

“My pigs aren’t picky,” Robert says. Pecan rolls, cow

heels, burnt crepes. Four times a week, 200 pounds a load. The resort saves on disposal costs, and Robert has the best-fed pigs in the Caribbean. “It’s been a blessing. I can now stretch out my hands to the com-munity and give meat to friends in need.”

A problem recycled into an opportunity.

a day off. for the first time all week i pull on a swimsuit. It’s early. Guests haven’t yet struggled to their feet. I say hello to Errol cleaning the pool and to Veron, one of 28 landscapers on staff, and con-tinue toward the ocean, pausing to drape a towel over a beach chair. Leaning against a nearby life-guard stand, in total solitude, is a rake. I can’t help myself. This is an opportunity too good to waste.

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jamaica

ONE PROBLEM I CAN’T OVERLOOK IS THE WASTE. LEFTOVERS LAND BEHIND A WALL AT THE FEET OF ROBERT CARPENTER.

Whitehouse is still a sleepy fishing village, but now it has other career options.

Montego Bay

KingstonWhitehouse

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