Cold Calling

People burn, I have mentioned; It's something that is unpleasant and bad for business if you can't keep it under wraps. Living "over the shop" and having several live in staff on site makes personal space hard to come by. After spending 9 hours or more in the kitchen, by 6:30pm I often try to get a short break before service starts at 7pm. It's not worth going up to the flat, and besides I'd have to deal with the kids² if I went there, so I mooch around the bar; often this is a very bad idea.

The first booking for dinner is 7pm, there are a group of residents that have been out on a mammoth fell walk, got back later than expected and really want to get a bath before settling down for dinner. Perfectly reasonable. However, I have a kitchen full of staff waiting to do something and all the appliances up to temperature burning money. I have a full restaurant diary and I know what's going to happen later when everybody wants to be fed together.

"Yeh, fine, if you could be down as soon as you can and we'll try to fit you in." as I try to explain, as nicely as I can, the predicament I'm in; trying to fit everybody in later on. Of course the later booking will get upset if they are delayed because an earlier booking is late. I'm starting to feel stressed. The KP comes and asks what he should do now. "I haven't got an effing clue, the ba### customers are keeping us bloody waiting, go and effing clean something!" is the normal reply. Bless him, imagine Manuel and you'll not be far wrong.

But, you see, customers may drink all my beer, so I have to make more. They might well eat up our stocks of food and I have to prep up more. They sleep in the beds, tear up beer mats, drop mud off their walking boots on the carpets and generally make work for us and the staff, but most are really nice people and they do spend money. At certain times of the day I should really be kept away from customers.

The staff, between them, are capable of generating several, what I call "Manuel Moments" every day. It's perhaps not that each individual issue is a big deal. Everybody makes mistakes. But they are the same mistakes soandso made last year, and whatshisname did the year before. Constant retraining wears you down. But without staff, with all their own little foibles, we wouldn't be able to deliver the service we do. They are a good bunch really.

This post didn't start out as a whinge. It seems it might have turned that way. The preamble is really to set a standard of normal stress and irritation of our job. The above is all part of the territory and most of the time we are able to treat it as just a job. A difficult one, but a job none the less. It's down to us to mitigate the problems and try to get it right.

But, when it comes to cold callers, now that moves into a new dimension altogether. Imagine I'm serving some nice customers. "Can we try a pint of Hardknott beer?" They say "It would be rude not to" I might try to explain that really the economies of scale, or rather my lack of them, makes it cheaper to buy in beer and I would not be offended if they tried another brewery's beer. I might also point out that Hardknott beer is crap and the brewer is a complete nutter, but invariably that fails to put them off. "No, we'd really like to try a pint of your crap beer".

I'm halfway through pulling their pints when the phone rings. It might be a booking for a room, or for the restaurant, so I finish up serving, giving the good people rather less graces than they deserve, and rush to the phone.

It normally starts with "Can I speak to the person who deals with xxxxxx" or simply "Can I speak to the manager or owner" you know straight away you have a cold caller. Having guiltily given the aforementioned customers short shrift the temptation to say "No, piss off" is immense. The problem is cold callers don't take a polite "no, were not interested" as sufficient answer. Some even have the cheek to phone back if you simply hang up on them. They are often persistent and irritating and I find that blunt rudeness is the only answer.

It would seem that the hospitality business is a good target for cold callers. Up until recently we had been getting several a day. It really doesn't matter if I've got my arm down a drain, crawling around the void, boning birds in the kitchen² or blogging, unwanted phone calls are a distraction that are most unwelcome³ in my already busy day .

We found the Telephone Preference Service. It's great, not only because it reduces significantly the number of cold callers but moreover, when I get one and point out they shouldn't be calling because we're subscribed to the service, we get an apology and they hang up.

So, that's one less irritation to deal with. Now, where is Manuel?

¹Actually, they are not kids anymore. They are now young adults. There is some evidence of them being useful, one day perhaps. But before service I'm in a bad mood and stressed, their hair, music and nail varnish would just tip the balance. Oh, and the smell of burnt microwave popcorn.

²Boning out chickens, ducks or pigeon, you know, like removing the breast meat and taking off the legs. What did you think I meant?

³Calls from our many great suppliers are not unwelcome. In fact, without them calling we'd forget to order many things that we really need. Sometimes we forget to order things we really need anyway, which is really stupid, but happens.