Scincilating Spanish service

To say it’s going to be different when I’m home from holiday is a sure-fire understatement. As the days pass, it seems like everything here is becoming more and more the norm. The free cava, the free fruits, a £400 per night hotel suite with two free TVs, a kitchen and co all seem so... every day to me right now. The second we jump ship back to Blighty it’ll all no doubt hit us like a brick. Fair enough, we’ll still have the TVs. The hotel suite, and in particular the free cava, will bid us farewell the second we check out of Gran Melia Salinas – which is a shame to say the least.

It’s weird to think that just 8 days ago when I first stepped foot in this hotel suite that I felt like my holiday dreams had come true. We’d been handed a top of the range hotel suite for having some timeshare in this company, and with that we were awarded “Royal Service” – entitlement to a private pool available to about 10% of the hotel guests where we found our free nutritional treasures. I remember the first day we came to this pool I felt like I was in heaven. The world seemed to stop still whilst I bathed in the glory of this private area gifted to us for reward for coughing up in this timeshare.

It’s even weirder, and slightly discomforting, to think that just over a week later everything here seems so...normal. From the everyday private sunbathing area to the personal waiter attended to my beck and call when I fancy a browse on Facebook pre-evening meal, everything here seems like the norm. Going home is no doubt going to feel like a big fat slap in the face.

Today, I went downstairs to (one of the three) hotel bars and ordered a beer. Shamefully – since the waiter at first didn’t notice I’d sat down – I beckoned him over with a roll of the wrist before ordering one large San Miguel. A few minutes later, the man returned with an ice cold beverage alongside a small plate of crisps – a rather nice thought to say the least. As he put the tray of crisps down, one of the dozens of crisps fell on the floor. Now usually, you’d instinctively lean down to pick up the fallen comrade and return him to his peers on the plate (albeit on the side, as if in quarantine). As I leaned down to retrieve the crisp, the waiter quite literally went mental.

In as many languages as he could muster (though mainly Spanish, hurried Spanish, panicked Spanish and finally English), the man begged me not to strain a muscle and leave the lonely crisp on the floor. He ran off without a second’s though, and returned royally with an amazing plain white napkin – obviously the litter-retriever of choice for 5* hotels. He picked up the crisp right next to my foot as I simply watched in awe at what this poor man has been through in training to be forced to pick customer’s food up from the floor.
Meanly, I was actually quite tempted to pick another crisp up from the plate and “accidentally” drop it on the floor the other side of my chair – just to see what the waiter would do.

To think, my training at Bournemouth Football Club was more than sufficient in informing me of what action to take in pretty much every situation I’d encounter on the floor, at the bar, or in the kitchen during service – though picking up broken crisps for a customer certainly wasn’t one. In fact in contrast, we’d been told firmly that if we dropped a knife when taking empty plates back to the kitchen we had to leave it and pick it up later to “seem more professional”. Meanwhile, waiters in this hotel are being trained that if a crumb of crisp falls on the floor, they had to make it their number one priority to clean up any mess before an army of cockroaches invaded – or something like that.

I can’t help but admire the training (or indeed skill) of these waiters. For one, they can speak a minimum of three languages. One entertainment organiser today spoke in Spanish, English, German, French and Italian to bid spectators farewell and thanks after enjoying 90 minutes of motown classics at the hotel bar – in contrast, I can barely speak sufficient English since my mouth moves at 10 times the speed of my mind sometimes, meaning the end product to my efforts are more a random jumble of sounds than a series of articulate words.

I just wonder what these guys would make of my workplace. There’s times where I’d genuinely tut at waiters at restaurants around here for poor service – including, shamefully, the guy who spilled a drop of wine on our dinner table today after pouring some wine and not twisting the bottle after. Although, with the training and corresponding guts that have been royally busted by waiters all around me, I’m more than 100% sure they’d have a heart-attack at the state of our kitchen. Yes, we wipe our spillages up. Yes, we swiftly wash our dishes within minutes of retrieving them from happy customers. But unfortunately (and sorry Spanish waiters), we don’t pick up crumbs. Crisp-lovers, permission to faint – granted. (And while you’re out cold, I shall promptly applaud your high-class service).