TVC Office - Day # 10 - Solo

Fifth Saturday was anything but.......back to work in the TVC office, and it felt like a real Friday!  As you can imagine Friday's can be hectic at any popular RV park, especially during peak season, which TVC is smack dab in the middle of right now.  TLE and I went on duty at 9:30 am, and the office was already a madhouse.  I began preparing my lists of those departing the park on Friday, and those arriving, and was not quite done when it was time for another office meeting with Duane, the new onsite manager.  A campground, like TVC, which is an aging campground at 50+ years old, which has lacked an onsite manager for almost a year, needs work, and someone to organize and direct that work.  Duane seems like the guy to get that done, and some evidence of his determination to improve conditions is already manifesting itself.  Please don't misunderstand my intent, or direction here.  TLE and I have enjoyed our stay here in spite of some of the deficiencies of the park.  We are fully self contained, so we do not need to use the campground restrooms, or showers.  Admittedly, the restrooms need some updating, and a really DEEP pressure washing type of cleaning, but to be fair, they are cleaned twice a day, every single day.

We rarely have need to drive the interior roads as we walk, and bike most of the time, but the interior roads need repaving, and no doubt they will be within the next year now that Duane is here.

Probably the most frequent complaint we receive is the poor quality of the WiFi in the park, which is provided by Tengo Internet.  If you have traveled in an RV on a regular basis you will know that Tengo Internet is not highly thought of by those of us who need reliable internet.  As I jokingly relate, it works well between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am.....otherwise it is slow, and often you cannot connect after 6 am, and before 11 pm.  Based on Duane's report we will either get better WiFi from Tengo, or we will employ another vendor to make it better.  I don't think the problem is from lack of coverage in the park......there are 7, or 8 repeating towers in the park.....the problem seems to be adequate bandwidth to go around to the several thousand people who occupy this park when it is near capacity.  I am using it right now, and it is almost 7 am.....I can already see a significant degradation in the speed since I began using it at 6 am.  Since I do need reliable broadband I switch over to my Verizon hotspot on my Samsung Note 3 phone when Tengo begins to crash, but even that fails me sometimes on the weekend when the Verizon towers in SLT get overwhelmed by the influx of weekenders.

The meeting probably lasted 20 minutes, and we were back to our respective jobs.  Coming only recently from the workaday world I still have a mild loathing for too many meetings.  I don't mind meetings every couple of weeks, or even one on one meetings to clarify my responsibilities, or improve my performance.  There is a tendency by those in management, sometimes, to believe that frequent meetings will fix problems, but they don't.  Problems get fixed when employees are led by example, have clear direction, and clearly defined responsibilities.

It took me another 30 minutes to get my paperwork in order before I headed out in the golf cart to survey my domain and do my site checks.  Being that this was my first doing site checks on a solo basis I concentrated mostly on making sure those who were supposed to be departing were either departed, or in the process of departing.  If everyone who is supposed to be leaving has done so then it makes the arriving customers happier, and reduces the number of problems we must solve.  I had three pages of people departing, so it took me a while to make my rounds through all for sections of the campground, but finally, after about 3 hours, I was done.  Then it was back to the office to help out with those arriving, and those with questions.

(I had to switch over to my hotspot at 7 am to finish this blog post, as the Tengo Internet crashed right on schedule).

The time passed by pretty quickly, but by 6 pm my brain was fried, and so was TLE's.  We took a slow walk home, changed clothes, and then relaxed for about an hour.  TLE made a nice salad for dinner, and then we sat watching "mindless" TV for a couple of hours before heading off to bed.

You may wonder why we chose to return to the workaday life a couple of times a year, and put ourselves through "this".  The answer is quite simple.....we need to supplement our income periodically with "workamper" type jobs.  We can earn decent money in a short period of time, and then we are back to our nomadic lifestyle.  The money we earn from this job, and the Amazon job in the Fall will go to replace the tires on the VW, the trailer, and the remaining three tires on the rear of the coach, as well as perform the necessary periodic maintenance (oil change, new air filter, fuel filters, 23 gallons of coolant, etc.).  By removing these items from our monthly budget through the money we earn, we are able to have more disposable income, which means more fun, more adventure while we are in travel mode.  As long as we are healthy, and physically fit we will continue to seek out jobs such as this one.  A side benefit, as you know from reading our blog, is the people we meet, and the new friendships which are formed.

Thanks for stopping by!