So when I first heard about “technology” butlers and “e” butlers, I was a bit skeptical. But that was before I checked into London’s Dorchester Hotel recently and discovered that I had forgotten the power cord to my laptop back in New York. Has this happened to you? Apparently it happens all the time to guests at the Dorchester, because 10 minutes after calling Johnny Meehan, one of the hotel’s three full-time e-butlers, I had a replacement cord in my hands. “We have lots of these, keep it,” Meehan told me.

I remember arriving at another posh London hotel 10 years ago, needing a U.S.-to-UK phone adap-ter so I could plug in my laptop and make a dial-up connection. I called housekeeping, who referred me to the telephone department, who referred me to the front desk, who referred me to the concierge, who referred me to housekeeping. How times have changed.

“Often guests don’t believe that we exist,” Meehan says. “‘You must be kidding,’ they say.” And sometimes the butlers can’t believe what they’re called in to fix.

They’ve had guests who didn’t know how to shut off their laptops (no, you don’t just remove the battery and unplug it) and even one who didn’t realize that you have to double-click the mouse to open e-mail.

Meehan and his colleagues are called to the rescue for other quick, simple fixes. Frequently, guests can’t find the electrical, printer, phone and Internet outlets cleverly hidden behind a panel on the side of the hotel’s in-room desks. Other guests simply need a part, like a diskette or cord. All good butlers have a pantry, and these guys stock theirs with Ethernet cables, keyboards, mice, Ethernet cards, adapters and the like.

But other matters are more complex.

One of the most frequent and thorny issues for e-butlers at the Dorchester and at other hotels offering this kind of service is breaking through corporate firewalls so guests can collect e-mail.

Frank Anderson, technology butler at the Ritz-Carlton Central Park in New York City, reports that he once had a corporate guest “who just couldn’t get connected. They had a lot of special software; it was like cracking a safe. We spent 20 minutes trying to fix it ourselves, then got on the phone with his company’s IT guys explaining the situation. It took about an hour of tweaking.”

But usually it’s just a matter of adjusting a laptop’s settings to work with the hotel’s Internet system, and then adjusting them back when the guest leaves so the computer will work with the corporate network when he returns home. “We always ask permission to change settings and tell them what the old settings were,” Anderson says. “We live in an age of information, so guests are very concerned about what we’re doing.”

Not all of the e-butlers’ days are involved in fixing laptops, however. They also work with PDAs, mobile phones and other devices. One guest from France arrived at the Dorchester recently with a mobile phone for which the manual was written in German, a language he couldn’t understand. Solution: Meehan found a French version of the manual on the Internet and printed it out.

Another guest with a Macintosh discovered that the hotel’s in-room printers weren’t compatible. Solution: the staff found a driver online and downloaded it onto the guest’s laptop. Yet another checked in with a frozen Palm Pilot. The staff unfroze it, saving him the
$50 that Palm’s help line wanted to charge for the privilege (“it was just a matter of pushing the reset button,” Meehan ex-plains). Meehan chuckles about the guest whose Internet Ex-plorer had been taken over by a porn site that he couldn’t seem to get rid of.

Demand, not surprisingly, is high for e-butler service. The Ritz-Carlton’s Anderson reports that the staff does 20 to 30 laptop connections a day. On a busy day, the Dorchester’s Meehan gets 35 to 40 calls. Both hotels offer service 24/7.

I’m not sure what the demand is for pillow butlers (I bring my own, thank you) or fireplace butler (I’d be afraid of burning down the place) or bathtub butlers (what is a bathtub butler anyway)? But e-butlers are okay by me.