‘Come on, fellas, have a drink,’ he said.
‘Oh it’s OK,’ we answered nervously, looking around anxiously.
‘Please yourselves,’ he replied.
‘We thought you weren’t allowed to drink in uniform,’ we enquired.
Diego looked at us, startled. ‘You can’t drink in uniform, you can’t smoke in uniform, you can’t do fuck all in uniform. Bollocks,’ he sneered and laughed heartily before swigging back his brandy, and then ordered another one. He invited us to join him again. We assured him we were all right and quickly scurried away, thinking we had had a lucky escape. Basically, Diego didn’t give a toss. But I can assure you that he was one of the best guides that company had. He made every evening or day he guided great fun. He had a good way of painting a picture of the venue before you got there that made it sound like the best place on earth. ‘This is gonna be the experience of a lifetime for you all this evening. You are going to sample a unique food experience the like of which is reserved for only the chosen few, and you have all been chosen tonight. You have all been personally invited, by Rose and Art, the only New Zealand couple here in the Balearics, who have prepared this special treat for us. The entertainment is the cream on a very exclusive cake, and it all takes place in their home.’ We could hardly wait to get there.
On arrival, the tables were bedecked with wine – free, of course – and if you wanted beer, all you had to do was ask. Martin and I polished off four bottles of vino between us and the evening just flowed by. The excursion coincided with a bit of an episode for me, one that could have resulted in an amorous evening with one of my colleagues if I had let it get that far. Living on the same floor of the hotel as us was a girl called Flo, who was also in her first year as a rep. Flo, to put it gently, was fat. Very fat. She had the most penetrating blue eyes that stared right at you and said, ‘Let’s have fun.’ Now, I was pleasant to her, but nothing more; I didn’t want to encourage her at all. During our training course she had made a few suggestions to Martin and I about coming to her room for a massage – both of us – but we always turned her down, thinking she was only joking.
Well, that night Flo was sitting on a table near us at the Country Feast. She kept looking over and smiling at me all night long. At first I smiled back just to be polite, but, as the frequency of her stares and winks grew, I became more and more uncomfortable. I foolishly voiced my concerns to Martin, who really didn’t help the situation by smiling back at Flo and winking at her, while nudging me. My concerns grew to something near to panic when Flo followed me on an excursion to the bar. She leaned towards me on the bar and whispered into my ear.
‘Cy, you look all tense and stiff. Why don’t you let me give you a nice slow massage? I can move that stiffness to another part of your body.’ She giggled and slapped me on the bottom.
‘It’s OK, Flo,’ I replied with a nervous little giggle. ‘I’m not that tense really, I just need a good night’s sleep before we move tomorrow.’ And with that I beat a hasty retreat back to my table.
The final hour of the Country Feast was a bit of a nightmare. I tried to persuade Martin to accompany my every move, and to make sure he sat by my side on the coach back to Playa den Bossa. I ended up sprinting from the coach to our hotel, with Flo in hot pursuit shouting, ‘Come here, you little tiger!’
On the return journey, Diego made the evening complete by singing all the way home. It was a great evening apart from Flo’s pursuit of me, and certainly a good way to finish off our first two weeks on the island. God save me from fat women.
The next morning we were all packed and ready to leave the hotel to go to our respective resorts. You get very attached to each other during these courses and, instead of it feeling like the beginning of something exciting, it felt very much like the end. The truth was – though we couldn’t quite feel it at that time – that this was the first day of a great adventure. In another couple of days our guests would be arriving. That was when the fun would really begin. After all the training and re-training, that would be the acid test. Now things were going to get really exciting.
SAN MIGUEL – IT’S NO SAN ANTONIO …
TO MANY PEOPLE, the word Ibiza means complete hedonism: parties, raves, drugs, sex and wild, wild nights that never end. Throw in lots of sex with crazed women, or men, depending what your taste is, and that is pretty much the standard view of the island held by most people under the age of thirty. The reason for this misconception is, of course, San Antonio. San Antonio, as most people are aware, is Ibiza’s wild party capital, which really has heaploads of the above in abundance. The media love to do their bit to enforce this view of Ibiza. You don’t tend to see too many DVDs for sale that portray the gentle side of the beautiful island, its breathtaking views of the Med, its calming waters, its balmy afternoons with the sun gently falling into the sea, its magical atmosphere simply made for lovers. No, you are more likely to encounter DVDs or CDs of Ibiza uncut, unleashed, unbridled, undressed, untamed or unfurled – unruly interpretations of this little jewel in the Balearic crown. It is portrayed as being simply the wildest place on earth, and for many it lives up to this reputation. Back in my early days as a rep, I wanted to be part of this wild side, this magnificent concoction of madness.
So, as you can imagine, my heart was heavy as I made my way to the quietest part of the island, miles from the action. No, more than that: I was pissed off, well and truly pissed off. It took me a few weeks to realise that the widely held view of Ibiza as a party venue and nothing else was just a little inaccurate. To judge Ibiza by what goes on solely in San An would be the equivalent of watching film of the Brixton riots in the early Eighties and then, from that brief glance at one of England’s inner cities, deciding that the whole place was the same. It would be unfair and inaccurate. Ibiza is beautiful. But it took me, the original philistine, a few months to appreciate that. I wanted to be in San An, and here I was on my way to the end of the world. What shitty luck. I resigned myself to my fate and decided to give it my best shot, for a couple of weeks at least. If I got to feeling really depressed, I could always return to the world of sandpaper.
* * *
To be successful in this job, or at least to get the customer satisfaction results that the company craved to keep us ahead of the game, you had to make the guests like you. It wasn’t the answer to everything, but it sure helped. If they liked you, they bought from you and so you earned commission. If they liked you, they smiled at you and talked to you; it made your life much more pleasant. If they liked you, they gave you good marks on the questionnaires. And, I suppose, you had a much better chance of shagging them as well.
All guests were asked to fill in questionnaires at the end of their holidays. Questionnaires that asked how good you were, how nice their hotel was and how attentive you were to their needs. Many guests never realised how important these forms were, but the reps waited with baited breath to get their monthly results from these things. So it helped if the guests liked you. When the guests started to like you, they asked you questions, and these questions came up again and again. So what’s it really like to do your job? What have you done with the weather? was another favourite. What do you do in the winter? Can you speak the language? Do you miss your home and family? Do you get fed up with all the sunshine? The list went on and on, and you tended to have stock answers that you could rattle off. The trick was to sound like you had never heard these questions before, and that the people asking you were the first ever to do so. It could be tiresome, but when these questions started to come up, you knew you were on to a good thing. The relationship was starting.
The problem is that, over six months, they came up again and again. If it rained, you heard, ‘What have you done with the