This is the beginning!

Hi everyone,

When I came to America, I weighed only 95 lbs.  After 6 months I gained to 170 lbs.  It must the good food in U.S. or I ate too much.  How can you blame me?  When you can eat all you want for free all three meals.  You work for Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA, they let you eat all you want, as long as you wear uniforms.  Some of the staffs came on their time off to eat their free meals.  I didn’t do that.  But the master chef of the hotel like me a lot.  He fed me all the great food, including the same dishes our President Nixon ate.  My first job at the hotel was a dish washer.  I tell you what I had been washing millions and millions of dishes.  It was a hot and hard job.  You had to keep up with those waiters and waitress.  They served in the banquet room.  They picked up their dirty dishes on the trays and threw them in the   room windows.  I had to scrape the food off the plates before you put them in the dish washing machine.  It was a big machine, it was about 15 to 20 feet long.  You put in one end and it came out another end.  When the dishes came out, you had to wear gloves to pick them up.  It was very hot and steamy.  After you finished cleaning all your dishes, you have to sweep, mop the floor and emptied the trashes.  That was one of my hard job.  I never complained about it.  I worked hard and did the best I could.  Well the hard work paid off.  The Executive Manager was noticed me.  He called me to his office.  He said to me that ” Mana, you are a hard worker, you never complained and you always Nice to everybody.  I am going to put you to work at the swimming pool.  With your nice personality, our guests will like to have you serving them.”  I got a raise and promotion.  The first Thai staff ever worked as a pool man.  I loved this job a lot.  Majority of the guests were rich and famous.  They called me for reserving lounge chairs by the pool.  When they showed up, I gave them towels and took them to their chairs.  They tipped me sometimes 10 dollars, sometimes 20 dollars.  I was also a server.  The hotel served hamburgers, hot dogs, french fried and ice-cream.  I made a lot of money on the tips.  I also had so much fun with the guest’s children.  When they show up to buy ice-cream, I gave to them for free, because they behaved and had nice manners.  My supervisor approved to that.  He said that if the guess enjoyed them self.  They will come back again and again.  Ice cream was a less expensive items.  It is a great way to influence them to come back.  I made and saved a lot of money with this job for my trip to Texas.  This is the beginning.

Goodbye for now!

Mana