It’s hard to know which of Anna Morris’ lives is more quintessentially Silicon Valley.
Her previous: Up at 3 a.m., pack the kids over to mom’s, hit the road by 4:30 to beat the traffic from her affordable home to her job at the Santa Clara Westin. Arrive home 16 hours later.
Or her new: Same job. But instead of kid-packing and road-hitting, Morris walks into a bedroom at home at 7 a.m. and turns on a camera and microphone. She’s a floating head. A teleconnected concierge, if you prefer. That’s Morris on the big TV in the hotel lobby.
She works until noon, then breaks to play with the kids, run errands, work around the house. Then back on from 5 to 8 at night to help guests with evening plans.
“This is perfect,” Morris, 32, said, endorsing the new life. “I want to be close to home, yet I need to work. How do you juggle all that?”
You juggle it with technology, by beaming Morris to a 3-by-4-foot screen behind a concierge desk with a silver service bell.
Ding. Ding. She appears. Well, she appears from the chest up. (Which is a good thing, because sometimes it’s a nice blouse, nice blazer, shorts and bare feet under the desk.)
Some guests stare. Others say hello. Some walk up and ask for help as if it’s the most natural thing on Earth. (Will you be checking in, Mr. Jetson?)
Morris loves her job. And why not? Hotel concierge. How many people actually get paid to tell customers where to go?
But as much as she loved the job, the commute was crushing her. Like whole suburbs of people, she and her husband, James, moved to where they could buy a house.
They got a nice four-bedroom home, but Morris hardly ever saw it. She mostly saw James, a Los Gatos Safeway manager, when they could commute together. She mostly saw her kids when they were asleep.
She managed when it was just 2-year-old Jacques. But when Morris was pregnant with Luke, now 6 months, she had a thought: “Oh, God. I don’t know how long I can do something like this.”
One day at work she struck up a conversation with a guy who was selling the hotel a video-conferencing system. What would really be great, she chuckled, would be to hook the thing up so she could help guests from home.
He said, `It’s possible.’ “
Morris wrote a plan covering how she could do the high-touch job with high tech. The Westin wanted to keep her. She was a star. Guests, some of whom spend as many as 100 nights a year at the hotel, knew her. The brass agreed to spend $50,000 and try.
That was about a month ago. Sure there are challenges. Jacques had trouble understanding that even though mom was home, when she was working she was not available for him. He’s catching on.
“Where does momma work?” Morris asks him now.
“The Westin,” he answers.
“Where’s the Westin?”
“Upstairs.”
No, life isn’t perfect. But the way Morris figures it, at least she has one now.
