I was once a waiter. I worked in two hotels in the north of Scotland, after I left school. I worked in the first hotel over a summer, and the second hotel from about May until September the next year.
Both hotels have since closed, but the second one is currently being refurbished.
By chance I came across the second hotel in TripAdviser the other day. It had received mixed reviews, but the responses from the ex-owner were…well, see for yourself, below. I have no idea whether the ex-owner via TripAdviser is for real, and he/she is definitely not the same person I worked for, a long time ago, in the same hotel.
In response to: “Disappointed Traveller”
xxxxx, Owner at xxxxx Lodge Hotel & Restaurant, responded to this review, 3 weeks ago
We’ve sold the hotel! We no longer care what you think. to be truthful, we didn’t care when we had the place, we just had to force ourselves to pretend we gave a flying toss about your illiterate, ill informed, mindless prole opinions. Are you really an expert in anything other than your own nasal hair? You certainly have not the first clue about hotels, restaurants, or anything else you consume. The internet has given you a voice, so now you blast your moronic thoughts all over the web.
This response applies to all of you who have ever posted anything anywhere.
In response to: “Poor service. Cancelled at last second.”
xxxxx, Owner at xxxxx Lodge Hotel & Restaurant, responded to this review, 2 January 2014
As The Stones once sang: You can’t always get want you want, but if you try sometimes, you might just get what you need.
In response to: “Lovely setting”
xxxxx, Owner at xxxxx Lodge Hotel & Restaurant, responded to this review, 2 January 2014
Thank you for your kind words, and thank you to everyone who took the time to say something nice about us during our time at xxxxx.To those who wrote of us as we are, I apologise for a lack of elevating eruditeness; there’s only so many ways to say ‘Glad you enjoyed your stay’ without sounding like a corporate marketingspeak drone. Which I’m not. To those who posted negativity borne of their own sadness, I remind that what goes around comes around. For every poor review received, I chose three random establishments and posted glowing reports. Hotels in Paris, Hanover, New York and Rio that I have never so much as walked past, received fine recommendations on this site. Restaurants in Zagreb, Dubai Helsinki and Bukina Fasso delighted me with food I never tasted. White water rafting, facepainting and animal stroking expreiences were written up as if providing me with a totally new me So so long Tripadvior, you opened a Pandors’s Box of small-minded spluttering and gave it a voice. Now you reap the whirlwind of a totally discredited website.
Wow!
The hotel in question is in a lovely setting, at the edge of a moor. They served good food when I worked there, and the setup was essentially good.
As one of two waiters (Kodak was the other one, I’ve mentioned him before in this blog), every second day you were on early duty, which meant that you started at 7:30am one day, and 8:00am the next. Some days, we didn’t get cleared up until midnight, so it could be a long day, but we were off for two or three hours in the afternoon.
The food for the staff was generally good, but my only gripe was that one day a week, for tea, we got a boiled egg. A boiled egg! On those days it was a Dickensian case of “More, please”. The owner, when I worked there, had diabetes, and fairly often he’d not judge the medication correctly. On those days the place became quite a bit like Fawlty Towers, and the shout would go out, “Where are those bloody boys”. That meant Kodak and myself.
Maybe, or maybe not, Kodak got the sack, for having long hair. I left a week later, at the end of the agreed time.