Confessions of a Holiday Rep - My Hideous and Hilarious Stories of Sun, Sea, Sand and Sex. Cy Flood
the fact they had been the only ones to offer me a job that summer – was that they offered thorough training. I had already been through the mill before I left the UK and, on arriving in Ibiza in late April 1992, I soon discovered that the guests didn’t actually start arriving for another two weeks. We were there to face another gruelling training course. That, coupled with the time spent learning the ropes in a hotel in England, certainly adds up to a lot of training before you even see a punter.
I was not alone; there were another hundred recruits as well for this season in Ibiza. We all arrived together in the middle of the night in a very quiet Ibiza airport. As soon as we walked through the arrival doors into the eerily quiet arrival lounge, we were each given an agenda for our latest training course for the next couple of weeks. We were then whisked to waiting buses and onwards to the resort of Playa den Bossa. On arrival at our home, one of the hotels in the resort (home for the next two weeks, anyway), we were handed our room keys. My worst fears had come true. I would be sharing a room. It turned out that my room-mate had arrived earlier that day from Manchester. He was already in the room. My room.
I hadn’t actually shared a room with anyone since I was six years old but, even way back then, I knew I wasn’t cut out to share my sleeping quarters with anybody. It was tough then, and the room-mate in question had been my brother. Now it was going to be a complete stranger. You get used to your own company in bed. I like the privacy to daydream about the day gone by or the day to come. I like the privacy to pick my nose, or even – if the need arises – to scratch my arse or fart or both, or even to read, and many other things that I dare not mention. Wrist exercises and the like. This is always difficult if you are sharing. I’ve always found that you quickly get used to your own bodily noises, functions and smells. You become quite tolerant of your own shortcomings. Yet when you witness the same smells and noises coming from a bed a couple of feet away, it’s incredible how disgusted you can become.
This was a bad start, but I had no choice: it was a case of share or go home. I decided to share. I just had to hope that this would not be the permanent arrangement for the whole season.
The hotel was quite expansive and judging by the number – 2353 – my room was quite a way off from reception. I don’t quite know how I worked that out; I just had this sixth sense about it. I was right, though. It was bloody miles away from reception. If you walked it in your shorts and T-shirt, it would take maybe just a couple of minutes at a brisk pace: up the stairs and past the pool and the entertainment area outside, up another two flights of stairs, along two more corridors, and you were there. No problem. It’s a different story when you’re laden down with heavy suitcases containing enough luggage for the next six months. My suitcases were heavy – dangerously heavy. Heart-strainingly heavy. This severely compounded the difficulty to the task in hand. After a long, tiring journey, which had begun that morning in Bristol, I dreaded this final thrust.
I decided there was only one way to approach it. I summoned all my last reserves of energy in an attempt to get the cases to my room as quickly as possible. This went OK for a while. First I attacked my hand luggage, taking it straight to the room so I could familiarise myself with the geography of exactly how to get there. When I arrived, I decided to knock on the door in case my room-mate was taking any midnight wrist excursions. I knocked politely. After waiting for a few minutes, I started to reach into my pocket for my own key. Just as I did so, the door handle turned and the door opened slightly. I pushed my head through the gap, just in time to see a figure climbing back into bed. This was my first encounter with my new room-mate, Martin. The time in Ibiza was 11pm. Going to bed at 11pm where I came from was unheard of. I figured he was either upset about something or a boring bastard. I later learned neither of these assumptions was true, but more of that later.
Back in reception, there was a general hive of activity as other nervous trainees were scuttling to and from rooms with gigantic suitcases filled with God only knows what. I saw my largest suitcase sitting in the corner of reception, looking menacing, with its outsize zipper grinning at me defiantly, like a row of silver teeth, saying, ‘Come on, have a go.’ I summoned all my strength and lunged at the case. I figured that once I got this heavy one out of the way, the rest would be a cake walk.
At first the case was stubborn. It seemed heavier than before. I went as quickly as I could with my cumbersome load – through the reception hall itself and out towards the courtyard and past the pool. The doorway to the staircase proved tricky, but with an even sterner effort I managed to drag it through. The stairs required superhuman stamina, but I didn’t stop. I pressed along through the corridor, and with one last effort I grounded the defiant bundle at my door. I rested before opening the door and giving it the final push home. In truth, I was tempted to break into a mad bout of laughter in celebration of my first conquest on foreign soil. Small as it was, I was jubilant.
Then a squeaky voice piped up from behind me. ‘I think you’ve got my suitcase there,’ it said. I turned around to see a small, pretty blonde girl, with the biggest blue eyes, looking accusingly at me.
‘Oh no,’ I replied confidently, ‘it’s definitely mine.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely mine, look at the tag.’
I looked at the tag, expecting to see ‘Cy’ written soberly in the corner. But when I turned it around, there to my utter horror was written the name ‘Monique’. In crayon.
‘See,’ said the girl. ‘Thanks.’ She dragged the case to her room, two doors away. The last I saw of her case as she disappeared into the room was the grinning zipper. I was mortified. All that effort, to carry someone else’s case to their room. My immediate thoughts were to run after the girl, grab the case and take it straight back to reception, whatever the effort involved, but she was just too quick for me. If only I could have got my hands on her case, I could have beaten it up, disfigured it in some way so I could never mistake it for my own again. I consoled myself by reflecting that mistakes can happen to anyone. I returned to reception to see my cases where I had left them; they were grinning at me defiantly. Half an hour later they were in my room, where I resolved to leave them untouched until the morning, when I could thrash them relentlessly.
I prodded my room-mate to see if he wanted to join me in the bar for a quick drink. He refused with a grunt, and off I went alone for a solitary nightcap. As I sat alone in the bar supping a well-earned beer, I felt no small amount of anxiety about the future. In essence this was just another training course, but whereas the last one was still in the UK, things now suddenly seemed very real. I was here in Spain, and there was no going back. I had given up everything I had at home for a moody room-mate and heavy suitcases.
Not surprisingly, I was feeling a little lonely and nervous about the future. Dotted around the bar were others huddled together in little groups for security – there is safety in numbers. It was a low-key start to the greatest adventure of my life to date. I sat there contemplating the world and was down to my last sip of beer and about to retire to bed when from around the corner came my old friends, Liz and Julie, from my training course back in England. I was very glad to see them charging towards me. They hugged me together; it was a bit like being in a scrum down with the England pack, but it was very welcome to know that I had friends here after all. A few more drinks were imbibed, and suddenly it didn’t seem such a bad place after all.
Some time later, my mood had lightened as I made my way to my room for a good night’s sleep. But my plans took a severe beating when I opened the door of my room. I was nearly knocked back by the sheer volume of my room-mate’s snoring. It was deafening. How the hell anybody in the room next door was managing to sleep was totally beyond me. How I was going to sleep was the more immediate problem, and I couldn’t for the life of me see how it would be possible with Martin letting passing ships know of his whereabouts in the bed next to me, barely two feet away. I felt like I had been invited to an exclusive horn-testing session of the QE2’s finest.
I immediately considered the possibility of sleeping on the bathroom floor. No good, too small. I should mention at this point that the area we were staying in for the duration of this course was situated right alongside Ibiza’s only airport in Playa den Bossa. Planes regularly roar overhead, either taking off or landing. Compared to Martin’s snoring, however, this noise was tame. The only