Celebrity Summer

We have had many celebrity guests staying at the semi-finished hotel over the summer.

The 90s Rock Star

The 90s rock star was playing at a music festival nearby. His management booked (and paid for) the entire top floor of the hotel so he wouldn’t be disturbed by other guests. We were instructed that he wanted to look at all the rooms before deciding which one he would be staying in. This process was to be done without a staff member being present. These instructions were given to us at least half a dozen times in the run up to his stay. There was much excitement in the run up to his visit, the car pulled up, the very large amount of luggage was unloaded. He looked at every room on the top floor, decided he didn’t want to stay in any of them, the luggage was loaded back into the car, and he departed. Luckily, the rooms were pre-paid, so the hotel kept the money and we resold the rooms to other people.

The Football Manager

The football manager’s wife was taken ill overnight with an episode of vomiting. We suspected it was due to large amount of wine she had consumed that evening, but the football manager was adamant that she needed to go to hospital. However, not a NHS one (“I’ll just get hassle”, he informed me) so instead we had to research what private hospitals in the area would be open at that time of night. We eventually managed to find something and called with the good news. Then he wanted a taxi, but only one with blacked out windows (“I’d prefer a limousine”). The only one we could find was currently at the airport which was over an hour away. This was fine, he said, they would wait. By the time it arrived, the football manager’s wife had fallen asleep and he decided not to go to the hospital after all.

The Reality TV Star

The reality TV star filmed her arrival to the hotel. She didn’t like the footage so she it again, this also wasn’t good enough, so a third attempt was made. By now there were a long line of people waiting to use the main entrance. She filmed everything, her credit card had a photo of her on it. Then at dinner, she brought a collection of marker pens and photos so people could get her autograph. However, nobody did. This seemed to make her fly into a rage, and she left a terrible review on her social media page about the lack of attention she received before leaving the restaurant.

We have two more bookings next week that have been made under false names, let’s see what happens!

I Hate Driving In My Car

This week I travelled somewhere by car. This for most people would be a normal daily occurrence but a car journey for me is so rare I remember when they happen, the previous time was months ago and I haven’t been anywhere in a car since.

Now, this isn’t because I have some moral objection to cars but simply because I have no need to use them. I love busses, tolerate trains and am quite happy walking and this has always been the case. In fact, I am now officially middle aged and still have never had a driving lesson.

A lot of people find it unusual to find a person of my age who doesn’t drive and often assume it is because I have been banned following a terrible incident. Actually, it is because I find the idea of driving terrifying.

Firstly, there seems to be a lot of admin involved. Licences, registration details, tax, insurance. Plus, the commotion of actually buying the car in the first place. All this seems overwhelmingly complicated and I would rather not bother.

Secondly, the process of learning to drive is (I am led to understand) expensive, lengthy and difficult. Multiple lessons followed by exams. I haven’t taken an exam in twenty years and the idea of failing multiple times and retaking over and over again in a spiral of humiliation is horrible.

Then there is the actual driving bit. Being a pedestrian can be unpredictable. Other people, weather, birds and dogs all present hazards while walking around but it is unlikely any of these will result in hospitalisation.

That is not true in a car, so many drivers are crazy. Having vehicles flying around corners, from every direction, at any moment together with all the pedestrians, weather, birds and dogs make the idea of being in charge of a potentially deadly heavy object unbearable. Plus, if anything did happen there would be yet more admin.

I think I will stick to walking, it’s just easier.

The Best Days Of My Life?

The old saying goes ‘school days are the best days of your life’. I think this is about as true as carrots helping with night vision or crusts making hair curl. I hated school.

I think I had already figured out that most of the things we were learning would have no practical application in real life. Knowing the symbols for elements on the periodic table, the cause of an oxbow lake or the relationship between Hermia and Helena in Midsummer Night’s Dream were all pointless. This took all my interest away from whatever the government decided that we were being taught.

My last day at high school was an odd one. We had a big assembly and all the students I expected to stand up and read their own poetry did exactly that, lots of people (including the drama teacher) cried and I just couldn’t get it. What were they all upset about? Are they really going to miss hours of essay writing, trigonometry or hockey in the rain?

My walk home that day was possibly the happiest I had ever been. I knew I had exams coming up but didn’t care, the worst was over. The exams themselves didn’t seem to make any lasting impact on my memory, other than a fire evacuation part way through. We all left the exam hall part way through and were forbidden from speaking to each other on the playing field. A ban on birds eating worms may have been more successful.

Exam results day also seemed unnecessary. I left it most of the day before working up the effort to go back to school to collect the envelope, it just didn’t seem important. It was only when I started getting phone calls from concerned family members that I finally went but by then I had heard the usual news reports about exams were getting easier and so our achievements were worthless, and I think I agreed.

I did fine in my exams and since then nobody has ever asked what grade I got in my religious studies GCSE, which is good as I really don’t remember anyway. I believe that since then, teachers have tried much harder to make education more relevant and engaging which can only be a good thing. I wonder if the teenagers today still know what an oxbow lake is? I don’t think it would be a negative if they had no idea.

The Great British Summer?

In the 1990s, if it had been explained to me that the effect of global warming would mean the central heating clicking on in July, I would have paid more attention to my recycling. It is now the second week of July – the schools break up next week – and the entire month’s rainfall has already come down. I wouldn’t mind if April/May/June/any month had been decent but getting my winter coat back out of the wardrobe on a weekly basis is particularly aggravating.

Business has not been great at the semi-finished hotel. The scaffolding has had to be cancelled (too wet), the garden renovations postponed (too boggy) and the customers are put off by the weather forecast. The BBC weatherman reported on TV that this is unlikely to change before the end of the month.

On a recent trip into the local town, I spotted the supermarket staff removing a stand of suntan lotion and putting umbrellas in their place. There were people on the bus wearing bobble hats and all the al fresco café tables are safely chained up in back alleys.

This summer has been a (quite literal) wash out. What is interesting is that there are tourists around but they are mainly international, from places like USA or Japan. People who find the rain ‘quaint’ and eat ice creams while shivering under ponchos. The traffic is horrible as nobody is walking, for fear of being splashed by passing lorries, the busses are ages behind schedule and ducks are swimming in the roadside puddles.

Its no wonder UK tourists are abandoning their staycations. A flight to the Mediterranean is currently cheaper than the train to the airport. To tempt people in, the semi-finished hotel is trying a range of special offers hoping to find people who would like to spend their summer on a soggy northern building site. Sadly, these offers have been designed by the people from head office who announce them to the public before actually checking if we sell the products we are discounting. In fact, it is often the customers who let us know the offer is happening. Then we have to phone the head office to ask how to process their vouchers. Except everyone from the head office is on a flight to the Mediterranean.

We are currently pinning our hopes on the rock music festival which is happening nearby in a few weeks. It is heavily rumoured that a lot of celebrities are staying on site that weekend (the rich and famous are not risking the camping option). It is also likely that it will be chaos, with exasperated personal assistants and managers all barking instructions on behalf of their clients. Having checked my diary whilst writing this, I noticed that I am on holiday that week (shame!) Now how much is that Mediterranean flight?

Cardiff Calling

I had to leave Cardiff suddenly in 2005 when I was fired from my dream job. They were right to dismiss me, my performance had been terrible. I’d have fired me too. The weekend after it all went wrong, I applied for everything and the first people that said yes were a holiday company offering a summer season in Tenerife. I packed up and left immediately. But what happened to Cardiff since I’ve been gone?

The apartment I had booked overlooked the river. It was a new development that I couldn’t work out. I had to ask a security guard in a supermarket where it was, then I felt duty bound to go and buy something. Perhaps it was the sunflower lanyard & ear defenders or maybe he was just not used to people asking him questions, but he followed me round the shop. Under pressure, I got a load of things I didn’t want to buy including three varieties of sausage roll.

Cardiff Bay has expanded yet the difference between what I remember and what I saw is how quiet is has become. Even though it was a weekend in early June, it felt like there were more places to eat than people who wanted to eat in them. I chose a takeaway from a noodle restaurant, I had about 10% of it, then a seagull swooped and scattered the rest across the pavement. Within about three seconds, I found myself in something similar to a remake of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ and promptly moved along.

I had a lovely tour around the Wales Millenium Centre where we got to watch the technical staff setting up for a performance of an opera I was unfamiliar with. All the extremely heavy sets are still raised onto the stage by ropes operated by stagehands. I asked why it wasn’t operated by computer and that question went down about as well as if I had asked why it was not operated by alcohol fuelled puppies.

Following that, I took the water taxi into the city centre to see how it had changed. It turned out that I had no memory at all of how it used to be so nothing to compare it to. I just wandered round a generic shopping district that could have been anywhere. The only thing of note is that on three separate occasions, I was stopped by somebody from the Hare Krishna movement, all of whom asked me what music I was listening to. None of them seemed to understand that I was just wearing ear defenders and not listening to anything. In the end I gave up trying to explain and just said Celine Dion.

The following day I took a walk along the barrage, something that hadn’t been built when I was last there. It was a lovely, if windy day, and an inflatable obstacle course had been set up in the water, populated entirely by excitable children struggling not to be blown into the water. I decided to leave them to it.

The final stop on my trip was a bus ride to Barry Island. This is one of those places where I have heard a lot about but never actually visited. Imagine a much smaller version of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach where everything is on a tight budget and you wouldn’t be far wrong. I wanted to go on the big wheel so I could get a view of the harbour but it was operated by tokens and the machine only sold awkward amounts so I had to get £10 worth of the stupid things. The big wheel was nice, giving me a good view across the bay.

But I still had eight tokens left. I tried to use them to buy a burger but no, food didn’t count, a terrifying woman boomed at me. So, I went on a rollercoaster ride, a really small rollercoaster. I was the only person on it and I was only there to use up the tokens. Honestly, it was rubbish and I have never felt so tragic as a middle aged man going on an empty rollercoaster alone. Out of sheer embarrassment, I gave my remaining tokens to a passing woman and her pre-school child (people the rollercoaster may have been more suitable for).

Before I left Cardiff, I had a quick look at the place I got fired from 19 years ago. It was exactly the same, the desks hadn’t moved, I am sure the chairs were the same too. The only thing that had changed was me and I am fine with that.

It had been a good week… That was until the ‘Unfortunate Train Incident’…

To be continued…

Next Please

Recruitment at the semi-finished hotel has been particularly thrilling. The sheer number of odd balls that have come out of the woodwork is something to behold. Highlights include…

A man who sent a picture of himself posing by a flowerbed outside a terraced house as an answer to the question ‘what makes you suitable for the role’.
A lady describing herself as an influencer who only wanted the job if she could ‘create content’ during work time.
The man who answered ‘what does customer service mean to you’ with ‘I spent the last sixteen years arguing with my ex-wife, so I am used to putting people in their place’
The woman who ‘doesn’t use computers’ so will work for a lower wage as she ‘won’t do the computer work’.
Someone who started their cover letter with the phrase ‘since my most recent conviction for attacking a police officer’.

While these were the highlights, a huge number of candidates presented CVs that were badly written, incomplete or contained spelling mistakes. There were also a couple that seemed like they were entirely created by AI, people who admitted not having the right to work in the UK and others who had been fired from the company on previous occasions (in one case for stealing money from the till). The bin became very full, very quickly.

Then I invited people to interview, easily half of them didn’t respond and a load more did book an interview but didn’t actually show up, wasting hours of my time. Actually, getting to interview anyone at all felt like a rare event. Sadly, many of the interviews that happened were not too inspirational either.

The candidate who opened with the line ‘I will need a lot of time off as the doctor won’t let me have my gastric band until my hernia has cleared’.
A man who when asked ‘can you tell me a time you have made a difference’ replied with ‘no, I don’t really ever make a difference’.
Someone who left their last job because they were not allowed to take the entire school summer holiday as annual leave.
A lady who spent the last eight years doing product campaigns for a supermarket, I asked her to tell me about one of them, she said she couldn’t remember any.
A man who arrived with a lot of make up and as he began to sweat, a huge tattoo across his entire face was revealed, including a revolver and skulls.

Our recruitment tactics evolved into going to other hotels and giving business cards to anyone who seemed able to carry a tray without dropping it or bursting into tears when a customer asks where the toilets are, so we gradually started to put a team together. Now we just need a functioning hotel for them to work in…