Those who want to be hand-held through a holiday should go online before they leave home
“We have a dishwasher in the tiny kitchen, but we can’t get it to work. Nobody explained it to us,” the crimson-faced Englishman bawled into his held-aloft cellphone in the WiFi-lounge-cum-games-room of our Alpine self-catering apartment block.
He was evidently hopeless, not only for his inability to use a dishwasher – or, heaven forbid, to find an alternative involving using his hands, the sink and some dishwashing liquid – but also for having failed, before hitting the ski-slopes, to apply sunblock to the areas of his face not obscured by his ludicrous goatee. The room fell silent. Children stopped playing pinball, ping-pong and pool. Adults looked up from their online newspapers in disbelief.
“Oooooh, I know,” replied the dismembered voice inside the phone for all to hear. “I read online that the place has a problem with dishwashers. Everyone’s complaining. But it’s better than the other review I saw about the fully-catered chalet next door, where they were given steak and ale pie. I mean, that’s not very French is it? At least you are not staying there.”
Imagine their disgust if they had been served frogs’ legs or thrushes’ gizzards instead. That’s very French …
“It’s disgraceful,” continued the increasingly red and apoplectic Goatee Man. “There’s nobody here to ask. No receptionist. We have been left totally alone.” The room-full of people again looked surprised. We didn’t feel alone. There were dozens of us, listening to his idiotic diatribe.
Luckily there was a defibrillator on the wall behind him, in case, as we say in South Africa, his heart attacked him.
We had found the place, on the contrary, to be remarkably well-equipped. The beds were comfortable, the furniture was sturdy and only in France would a self-catering flat include such crucial equipment as a carafe and a glass lemon-juicer. There were two salad bowls (because to a Frenchman, one salad bowl is never enough) and the provided rubbish-bags had built-in little strings to tie their tops tidily.
In the lounge, the ubiquitous music that risked drowning Goatee’s complaints was delightfully cheesy. France is stuck firmly in the Seventies –tight John Travolta pants, loads of Abba and D.I.S.C.O. – but in a country that produces 600 cheeses, I guess the music mirrors the diet.
The blue-sky views from the huge windows of towering, snow-clad mountains promised many days of enviable skiing. Had we a complaint, it would merely have been that the room smelled of stale cigarettes, but it seemed oddly apt in the land of Gauloises.
An irresistible rummage through the establishment’s online reviews unearthed proof, not of any inadequacy in the establishment itself, but of the appalling incompetence of the people frequenting it. There was the usual whinging and whining, my favourite involving a family, left similarly “totally alone” by the management, only for one of them to get stuck in the loo. In the absence of a receptionist, they had been left with no choice but to call the fire brigade, who had smashed the door down.
The reviewer’s indignation was multiplied ten-fold when he was charged for the broken bathroom door and for the callout of the emergency services.
As I read it, and aptly for many reasons, Waterloo was playing in the background.
This was the “worst hotel in the entire world”, wrote our keyboard warrior. It was entirely management’s fault that he was incapable of extricating a family member from the bathroom without structural alterations. And nobody spoke English. How disgraceful! In France!
I hope these people didn’t try to use the dishwasher. The chances are they’d have needed someone to help them to operate the defibrillator as well.