Can't Employees Pay Attention?

I'm on the road staying at a hotel.  Last night I had dinner in the hotel restaurant.  The food was good, the service was lacking, but there was one thing that drove me up a wall.  The background music (which was actually louder than background music should be) was Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nacht Musik."  Now, there's nothing wrong with that.  I like Mozart and Eine Kleine Nacht Musik.  It's a beautiful little piece that runs about a minute and thirty seconds.

Here's the problem.  That was the only music they played.  It was looped, so it played over and over and over again.  We were in the restaurant for about an hour, so I heard the piece approximately forty times. 

Here's what I wonder.  Why didn't any of the staff at the restaurant notice this ... and change the CD or turn the blessed thing off??  The problem in the service industry often is that we train people so specifically to look after their assigned duties that they don't notice anything else might be amiss. 

When I worked for a Pizza Hut franchisee, I remember going into one of the restaurants in the summer and noticed that the promotional placards were still up for Christmas.  Didn't the manager - or anyone else - notice that Jingle Bells was no longer playing on the radio?  Once again, they were probably so focused on their assigned tasks that they didn't see that something very obviously was wrong in their peripheral vision.

It isn't easy, but in the service business we have to train people to do their jobs, but just as importantly we need to train them to see the big picture.