Service Service Service v2 – Four Seasons Thailand

November 15th, 2010

I was recently at the sublime Four Seasons Tented resort in Northern Thailand and it reminded me of the first time I had ventured there for work a few years ago (this most recent time I was there off the clock).

http://andrewrowat.com/design/design02-2.html#1953,39

At the time the resort had just opened and I was shooting for Travel + Leisure’s hotel issue. In fact one of the images ended up being used as the cover.

If you have ever stayed at a Four Seasons you know that in response to any request they will always say “Certainly.”

“I would like a unicorn to deliver my low-fat extra-hot latte with the morning paper. And if you could arrange for a full moon that would be terrific.”

“Certainly.”

So on this particular shoot one of my light meters (I always carry two – redundancy!) decided that it was no longer interested in performing its core function. So I had a very dead light meter on my hands.

I popped the light meter open (this one had already gone for a swim in Australia once upon a time and been revived with a de-ionized water bath at a marine research station on Heron Island) to see if I could see anything that was obviously broken.

And lo and behold it looked like some solder points had cracked. Given that we weren’t exactly in downtown New York (the tented resort is located in the Golden Triangle on the border of Burma and Laos near Chiang Rai) I wrote it off for the rest of the shoot.

Four Seasons engineering staff weren’t having any of it. They absconded with my light meter and I went back to shooting. But not for long.

Soon enough my light meter returned, working perfectly fine, with all the contact points flawlessly re-soldered. Amazing.

“Can I have my light meter fixed and re-soldered along with that latte?”

“Certainly.”