24 February, Friday – Simply Unacceptable

Today was going to be along day, and I had no idea it would be made even longer. If I had any odea how long I would have taken a three hour nap. I got up at four to make my way to the Europa and meet my folks at 5AM. We had a taxi boat to the airport so they could check in by 6AM for their 7AM flight. I took the bus back to Piazzale Roma and tromped on home for a little bit of breakfast and correspondence. My new group was coming in on the train at noon so I had some time to chill out. This hroup would be a little bit different because they are part of a corporate event so I was not a full-time guide for them, just walk and talks in the mornings. It was more of a third-party situation, since they have their own corporste leaders doing event for team building, meals and corporate meeting type stuff. Fine by me. It didn't hit me that this seemed off until later, because I had only 6 clients listed in my email. There were no dossiers since it was a corporate event, otherwise I would have seem sooner that there was a typo.

As it turned out, there were sixteen people and not six. Plus their “plus-one” guest. Thirty-six in total if you include the corporate events staff. Good thing I wasn't expected to book restaurants for them. What a hassle that would have been on short notice. They were a group of sales awards winners from Toyota's West Coast region. Most of them were from the Bay Area as it turned out. I had such high hopes for things going well. People from home, for the most part. Yay. No...

After the train arrived and I flagged down the lead Toyota Corporate Guy, as people were getting off the train and there were more and more and more, I asked him how many there were. Sixteen. Great. The email was off. I was counting heads. Hey, how many? “Oh. Sixteen, and each with a plus one. And four of us.” Hey that's great. I have to get a couple more taxis now. Called the taxi company with our account and they promised two more boats within five minutes. When they arrived I set to loading the people onto them. This was the largest group I had ever taken on – there were so many things off about this tour already. Six into thirty-six is no small matter when even the group tours we do are limited to twenty-five. I could smell an email to HQ coming. Pronto. It's not that I couldn't handle it, I thought, it's just that knowing in advance would have been lovely.

We got to the hotel and got everyone offloaded and checked in. Rooms weren't all ready but no matter. We were going to be doing a walking tour of the San Marco and a gondola ride today. But I had to make a phone call first to the Doge's Palace to secure more tickets and make sure their guide knew the group number had grown exponentially. And I went to the gondolier station outside the hotel to the let them know we would need six boats instead of one. The corporate goons wouldn't be with us on the walking tour or the gondola. I wouldn't even be on the gondola.

The peeps had been in Rome and Florence first. Mighty nice sales award. Too bad they had to also have corporate action horning in on what would have been a lovely vacation. Plus, I thought the auto sales industry was in the toilet. Oh well.The only sense of dread I has was in the fact that these people were all in car sales (and their significants.) From ages seventeen to twenty-four I worked at a series of car dealerships, including a Toyota dealership, as every kind of administrative position available at a dealership, from reception and cashier to contracts clerk to warranty service administrator. And I never liked the salespeople. Well, a select few. But in general, the whole lot of them are primarily a bunch of asshats.

It did not take long to see that I wouldn't be proven wrong in that assumption.

Giorgio & I went out for dinner at the Dona Onesta. We both got phone calls from the hotel regarding the antics of "my" peeps. Aldo had called Giorgio and the hotel manager-on-duty called me. They didn't know we were together so it was pretty funny that our phones rang at pretty much the same time. The Toyota people were acting up in the bar. They asked me to come back and speak withthose those who were patronizing the bar, because they were causing disturbances with others in the bar and with other patrons of the hotel not in our group. Did they call the Corporate Events people to get them to watch over them? You know, the people who are actually in charge of these hooligans? No, because they couldn't contact them outside of the hotel. Giorgio and I nodded at each other and said we'd be there ASAP.

We finished dinner quickly, apologized to Safwat for eating and running and caught the vap. I was already seething. I'm a third party this time around and they are not really my responsibility - just a contracted tour guide daily in this instance. Still, I was expected to go and police them for their obnoxious behavior and noise issues in the bar. The hell?

So... let's see. They broke into the grand piano and began playing it, and kept going back to it after repeated requests not to. They were overly loud. Yelling across the room to each other. This is not a night club. This is an elegant, marbled floor, gilt-framed, silk wallpapered *genteel* room. There's no jukebox. There are not flair bartenders or mirrorballs or colored lights with DJs spinning tunes. One look at the place and it should be QUITE obvious that it's a quiet and respectable place. Yet, they continued to be loud and try as they might, they wanted to turn it into a club. One guy took a silver plated champagne chilling bucket to use an an amplifier for his ipad to play rap music. Two guys pulled the lifesaving rings off the back deck outside, placed them around their torsos and decided to play sumo wrestlers. There was screeching, yelling and cackling. I had made my way around the the group three times, asking them to please keep it toned down, there were other people in the bar, there were rooms overhead that were making complaints. One woman kept coming up to me and giving the reasoning that it should be okay because “you know – we're Americans and we're just loud!” To which I responded that was unacceptable reasoning. She wanted to argue with me with “but we're on vacation!” To which I responded “And so are the other 400 guests in the hotel, but they aren't causing disturbances.”

I finally told Aldo and Giorgio to kick them out, cut the off, ban them, whatever. I wasn't having it anymore. Bunch of asshats. And the whole time, the Toyota Corporate Events people were nowhere to be found. Knew I would be having a conversation with them and with the manager in the morning, so I prepared to get there earlier than I usually do.