When You Put Your Heart Into Boring Work: Room Inspection

When I worked as a hotelier, one of the most repetitive—and honestly, most boring—parts of the job was room inspection.

Once a guest’s check-in schedule was confirmed, we had to inspect the overall condition of the room in advance. Since guests checked in every day, this was something we had to do every single day.

Are all the kitchen cutlery and tableware items there in the correct quantities?Is the lighting at the right level?Are all the electronic devices working properly?Are even the insides of cabinets and furniture that guests rarely touch clean?Is the minibar stocked according to the guest’s requests?Are the fruit and flowers fresh?Is everything free of dust, smudges, and fingerprints?

If the room happened to be a villa, the inspection could be especially tedious. I had to walk around a large duplex villa and check every single facility one by one. Sometimes I felt less like a person and more like a machine programmed to inspect things.

Most of the time, everything was perfectly fine. Problems were rare.

Still, for that one possible exception, you had to repeat the same tedious process again and again.

At first, I also felt that the time spent inspecting rooms was a waste compared to the time I spent interacting directly with guests.

I would sometimes think, Everything is probably fine anyway. I’d rather rest for a while.

Then one day, for no particular reason, that boring stretch of time suddenly reminded me of a monk sweeping the courtyard.

I wondered what would happen if I tried putting my heart into even the boring work I disliked.

Of course, when things got extremely busy, there were days when I had no choice but to rush through the inspection.

But looking back, I often wondered whether there had been some kind of substance—some weight or value—that I had failed to receive from those moments simply because I had hurried through them.

I once learned that, for someone who sees society itself as a school, there is no hierarchy between important and unimportant work. Whatever task appears in front of you can become something you need to learn from.

Two people may make exactly the same cup.

One makes it simply to earn money.

The other makes it while thinking about the person who will eventually use it.

The same amount of time passes for both of them.

But after one year, three years, ten years, that difference in attitude creates two people with completely different depth and substance.

Once I began looking at room inspections differently, the first thing I would do was check the guest profile.

Their face, name, nationality, hometown, preferences, expected arrival time—anything we already knew.

Once I knew who would actually be staying in the room, unexpected ideas would often come to me, and I would start trying small things I normally would not have thought of.

For example:

The guest likes tea.

— Let’s put some extra water in the room.

The guest is coming from Japan.

— Let’s change the room tablet language to Japanese in advance.

The guest will be checking in at night.

— Let’s finish the turndown service beforehand.

Even when there was no preference data recorded for a guest, I would at least try to remember their face and name while inspecting the room.

Sometimes, halfway through the inspection, I would become completely fed up with it. Then I would picture the guest’s face and somehow find enough energy to continue—even though I had never actually met them.

That was when I realized there was a real difference between seeing a room simply as something that needed to be inspected and seeing it as the room where a particular person would soon be staying.

The task itself did not change.

But my motivation did.

When I thought of the room in the second way, I would sometimes find myself alone in an empty suite imagining the guest walking between the bedroom, bathroom, and living room.

Where would their eyes naturally go?

Would there be something I had skipped because I was tired, only for them to notice it and feel disappointed?

Thinking from their point of view made me check things one more time.

And sometimes, when I desperately wanted to sit down and rest, I would mutter to myself,

“Ah, this is exhausting. Fine, fine. I’ll do it for you, Mr. OOO.”

And then I would keep moving.

Sometimes, on the day a guest checked in, I would also happen to be the person assigned to greet the guest whose room I had inspected.

By then, the attention I had already given that person during the room-preparation process had usually turned into genuine curiosity.

So when I finally met them, the service naturally felt a little more sincere.

At the end of the day, hospitality is still a person dealing with another person.

There were guests I naturally became fond of.

And once I had already put care into preparing someone’s room, I would genuinely want to leave a good impression when I finally met them.

Whenever I asked questions out of real curiosity rather than professional obligation, guests often lowered their guard.

And once they opened up, there were far more things I could actually do for them.

An escort to the room or the few minutes spent serving welcome tea no longer had to be filled with awkward silence. It could become time in which we casually talked and learned something about each other.

And when a guest eventually left a good comment after their stay, it became a good memory for me as well.

That good feeling would turn into energy, and somehow give me strength for the next day.

Once, while greeting a returning guest, I asked him a question in the elevator.

“Your room last time had a similar layout to this one. Do you prefer rooms with a night view?”

“Last time you were so busy that you didn’t get to eat until very late at night. Have you eaten today?”

Until then, he had been silently looking at the floor.

Suddenly, he looked up at me with a slightly surprised expression.

“I do like rooms with a night view. I have dinner plans soon today.”

Then he looked at me for another moment and asked,

“You’re the person who served me room service late at night last time, aren’t you?”

He even remembered what he had ordered and the conversation we had had that night.

I had assumed that he remembered me but considered our interactions just another formal part of hotel service, so he had never said anything.

But the small sign that I remembered him made him open up.

And for a moment, both of us seemed slightly surprised by the fact that we had remembered each other.

While I prepared his welcome tea in the kitchen, he hovered nearby and started voluntarily telling me things he had never mentioned before.

What kind of tea he liked.

Which place he had enjoyed most during his trip to Korea.

Which Korean food had been his favorite.

Even the fact that the nationality written in his profile was not actually the country where he had been born.

Later, I had the opportunity to serve one of his acquaintances.

That person told me he had already heard about me, saying that the guest had praised me a lot, and even gave me a thumbs-up gesture in encouragement.

Only then did I learn several things I had never known before:

When that guest returned, it would be better to assign him a room with a night view.

He would probably appreciate being served tea.

And he preferred being spoken to in the language of his birthplace rather than the language associated with his current nationality.

I added those details to the hotel database so that the rest of the team could know them too.

Reading what I have written so far, I sound a little like I am trying to portray myself as some master of hospitality.

I was not.

This was simply one memorable example of what happened on a day when I happened to approach my work with the best mindset I was capable of.

I certainly did not remember every guest whose room I inspected.

What I wanted to share was something much simpler:

The weight of something big is often created by the accumulated effort we put into very small things.

At the same time, this side of me also came partly from perfectionism.

And whenever I could not maintain the same level of service, that perfectionism easily turned into disappointment in myself.

There was stubbornness in wanting to make sure no one could find fault with the rooms I had inspected.

There was also exhaustion from not knowing how to manage my energy and emotions with enough flexibility.

Thinking about that now, I am not even sure whether I would tell my younger self to work in exactly the same way if I could go back.

There was always a cost to my desire to make people smile through kindness rather than through some deeper, more fundamental competence.

And on the many days when I simply did not feel like smiling, I sometimes hid from guests because I was afraid they might discover that I was not actually the endlessly warm person I wanted to appear to be.

Still, room inspection gave me something valuable.

In the middle of an otherwise hectic schedule, it gave me a brief moment to stop and return to the fundamentals.

Sometimes I imagined the guest who would soon arrive.

Sometimes it had nothing to do with the guest at all.

I simply used that quiet time to look back on the day, record what I had learned, and gently put my mind back in order.