sabato 26 giugno 2010

Some time ago a regular guest of the hotel came to the reception in quite a distress. His wallet had been stolen. So goodbye credit cards, cash, documents etc. Unfortunately for us that meant that he couldn't pay his stay with us.
I knew the guest and of course I was concerned about his problem and we decided that he would make a bank transfer as soon as he got back home.
He never did.

At that time I was in charge of trying to make people pay for their outstanding balances. Normally it would be travel agents or companies. Some had cash problems, some simply forgot.
Every time I saw the open account of our former regular guest (of course he wouldn't show his face again) I felt betrayed and made fun of.

I called the guests mobile phone. Nothing. I went on the internet to retrieve his adress and home phone number. I wrote letters and called. Nothing. I even called in the middle of the night from my personal mobile once, just to see if someone would pick up. Nothing.
Months went by and it was getting really personal. My collegue Antonio and I started thinking about what we would do to that guy if we ever would get ahold of him. And let me tell you, the expressions used were not too nice...
Suddenly, almost 6 months later, my collegue tried to call again. Somebody picked up! Antonio started immediately to explain the nature of the call in a polite but determied tone. But soon he started studdering, even apologizing and finlly he hung up.
I looked at him quizzically and he explained: The person who answered the phone was not our man, but his son. He went on explaining how his father had been involved in a fatal car crash and died some weeks earlier.
We kind of felt sorry for the bad things we had said over the last months and it goes without saying that we dropped the whole thing.

What, you might ask, if this was only a scam? Well, where I live we believe that if you say something like this and it isn't true, it will happen to you eventually. So liers beware!

Nessun commento:

Posta un commento