In Response to "What Do You Do?"

I often get this question when I tell people my job title so I thought I would put it into layman's terms, non-hotel speak.

I am a Corporate Delphi Systems Analyst. I go in to work at the hotel featured on the picture but I work for the home office. Delphi is a sales and catering database. This software controls sales of hotel rooms, function rooms, keeps a list of all past and future group clients. It is also a tool to create Banquet Event Orders (what your party is having for dinner and if you need a microphone for that 30-minute speech).

Part of my job is that of a database administrator. I help create standards and procedures to make sure that the data that comes in is clean. That is important to me because I also mine that data through writing Crystal reports. You can ask me to pull rooms and revenue by State for lost business, and why we lost them. You can ask me for a list of clients so we can send them an e-mail blast regarding a new exciting promotion. I do sales month-end reports on a regular basis.

One aspect I enjoy is training. I must get the teaching part from my mother. I create Power Points and I teach them through Webex to anyone in the company who is willing or has been coerced to sit through them :-)

I do a lot of support work, I have my regular callers who ask me why they cannot merge proposals and I walk them through the steps. I am one of the first people they call when something is "not working." A lot of users cannot distinguish when it is a Delphi problem (which then becomes mine) or when it is something completely outside my scope of work (which sometimes also becomes mine). Of course, it is always the software and never the user !-)

I enjoy most aspects of my job. I am lucky enough to be able to just work part-time and I love the flexibility of being able to work from home on certain days. It is a far cry from what I used to do as a flight attendant or what I started out to do by studying Chemical Engineering. My work life has been interesting to say the least, I even had a stint as a Classified Line Ad Manager for a weekly publication in Hawaii.

What I am saying is that it does not matter what you do. If you have to do something, then do it well. If you hold yourself to higher standards than what other people expect, you will never go wrong.