Today Tuna and potties
Day twenty nine of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.
To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day 29 of our Spanish Lockdown, we woke to horrible weather, thick fog, pouring rain and a damp chill to the air. When we get this kind of weather it always reminds me of a disastrous holiday I went on with my father, his new wife two toddlers and a baby, my fathers second attempt at a family.
I had reached a crisis point in my career. Career huh! I worked on a Production line that made Britvic 55 and Pepsi Cola. It was sweaty dirty work, I still bear some of the scars where broken bottles had sliced into my hands, the place was crawling with cockroaches. My mother had got me the job following unemployment during the famous winter of discontent, then a rubbish job at a Petrol station, that I hated so much I used to turn the lights off on the forecourt in the hope I could quietly sit and listen to the radio. That worked well until a surprise visit from my Manager.
A written warning and punished by having to clean the car wash out.. yuk. And for about a month after I had to take in all the tankers, a foul job that meant climbing a ladder on the side of the lorry then balancing on top of the tanker with a dipstick to take the readings of how much was actually in the tanker. Finally the worst punishment of all .. cleaning the ladies lavatory.. girls you are disgusting, the worst thing the men ever did was to pee on the floor, that just needed a bucket of water with bleach to clean.
At least once a week in the ladies you would encounter human solids on the floor. Judy who was the Assistant Manager said to me one day, you are going to need this today.. she handed me one of those ice scrappers from the shop. I entered the ladies with trepidation .. and there stuck to the wall was a used tampon.. the ice scrapper was needed to remove it. More disgusting is that once I had finished Judy put the ice scraper back on the shelf. .. I resigned after that.
So I went to work on a noisy, deafeningly noisy production line. You had to wear ear protectors as the crash of bottle against bottle was so loud. But the money was really good. By that time I was working at the weekend for the local commercial radio station "Essex Radio." They offered me a job at £2.00 an hour, I was earning nearly £5 at Britvic.
So I needed time to think; so a holiday in Anglesey with my fathers new family seemed just the ticket. I can't say we saw very much of Anglesey. Every day it persisted down with rain, it was foggy, so any mountains to be seen, were hidden away. Worse, my father decided that it would be fun to go camping. If anyone has seen that clip from the Carry On film where Sid James and Bernie Breslaw put the tent up. It was just like that, only worse, the rain and wind combined meant that the rain actually got inside the tent, we spent most of the time huddled around the heater. One of the rare trips out in the hire car, in the pouring freezing rain with my father having to back the car into the tent so we could jump in through the hatchback boot turned to disaster. One of my dads kids was potty training, we were just leaving Bangor when the child announced they needed the potty for "big ones." .. so we sat with a steaming potty until we left the environs of the town and my stepmother Linda, threw the contents out of the car window.
Sitting on my own in the front of the car, with the family in the tent, I made the decision to quit the bottling factory and take the job at the radio station.
It's funny how a bit of bad weather can bring back a flood of memories.
So Day 29, - Easter Monday back in the UK - started quite poorly. We also had to brave the bank, so armed with an authorisation paper we went to the bank, there was a long queue of masked Salobreñians waiting outside. Luckily the cash machine was working and we both withdrew the maximum amount and then fled.
Ricardo the electrician turned up for his money, he had fixed new air conditioning and an unrelated cable fault, put a new lightning detector and electrical surge detector in. He also bought with him a lovely bottle of Chlorine. "I found only one place open and have bought this for you."
So the day improved. Many places are closed even the ones that are allowed to be open. Finding shops shut even without a pandemic is de rigueur here in Spain. When you do actually find a place open there can be a complete lack of any sales technique.
My friend Petra from the big house went to have her iPhone repaired. The salesman said, "ah this is facil, I can do this in maybe five minutes."
"Excellent," said Petra "I will wait." the salesman looked at her and then looked up at the clock with was at ten to two and looked back at her. "We close for lunch, come back at five." She knew that arguing that a job that takes five minutes could be done 'before lunch.' would be a waste of time, so she returned at 5.30pm. "Ah here is your iphone.. it is broken." He had failed to mend the phone and handed it back to her. "That will be forty euros please!" "But you havn’t fixed it." There followed a long argument in which Petra left the shop minus her broken phone.
Chris bought a tin of tuna from the local superstore, one of those large tins that had a little key you pull to open it, ..the key broke off, we had the receipt so returned to the shop, stood in a long painful queue at customer services and Chris placed the tin onto the counter. The woman picked it up, holding it between forefinger and thumb. "What is wrong with this tin?"
"The key has broken off." Chris said. She slowly inspected the damage, let out an annoyed sigh and said "ticket!" "here you go." Chris handed the receipt over and she walked away from the two of us toward her colleague, they poured over the receipt, inspecting it like a archaeologist would a piece of dead sea scroll. She returned, another sigh, she punched the till and returned the four euros it had cost, but not before producing two receipts which she stapled together... welcome to Spanish customer services.
Our friends David and Colin had arranged for someone to come and give them a quote to fix their pool. Manuel arrived and inspected the work. "This will take little time to fix, I shall return Mañana."
A few weeks later we returned to the Super Store to buy more tuna. Chris picked a tin up from the shelf... "I don't believe it." he said .. it was the same tin of tuna we returned - minus its key!
Meanwhile at David and Colin's and six months later - they were relaxing by the pool and heard a noise, somebody was crashing around in the pool room. It was Manuel who had returned to fix the fault. David, incredulous said "We had that fixed months ago." Manuel looked surprised. "But you asked me to do it!" ..
Jen and Jack had a similar experience at the Super Store, they bought some garden furniture. Tied it to the roof of their car. Half way down the motorway the furniture it all fell off onto the motorway. Stupidly Jen stopped the traffic and managed to put it back on the car roof. Cheekily they returned it, got their money back. A week later she said they were back in the super store "And they had put it back on display for sale, even the broken bits!"
Finally our friend bought a thirty thousand Euro Landrover from a main dealer. She had been a customer of theirs for many years. The Salesman handed her the keys and came close and whispered in her ear. "I have left a special present for you on the back seat." Thinking that it might be a set of mats or a tool box, she opened the back door of her new car to discover some sachets of car wash.
But everything has changed recently, suddenly shop assistants have started to smile at you. At the Super Store they are all wearing teeshirts that say in Spanish "Can I Help You." Many offer free delivery.. unheard of until recently
I have a suspicion why Spain has improved so much. We are going to spend the evening catching up on some Amazon Prime TV, yes Amazon Prime arrived in Spain about a year ago, complete with free delivery, easy returns and streaming TV.