Where the Desire for Full-Time Employment Comes to Die

By the end of August, the problems I had anticipated having with Miguel the waiter were reaching their zenith. Being, as he was, of the opinion that his lofty position as “head waiter” – as well as being irrefutably irresistible just by dint of his Latin blood – gave him the right to haul me into an octopus-like embrace at every possible opportunity.

And let’s not forget the bottom grabbing – those invasive tentacles never failing to voyage merrily around my nether regions every time I has the misfortune to find myself in his vicinity.

Manolo visited the restaurant one evening and, as politely as he could manage (which wasn’t very) asked him to stop. The upshot of which was that Miguel refused to exchange another word with me for the rest of my time there.

It was difficult to assess whether that was a good thing or a bad thing: Yes I would be blessedly safe from the pinching and groping, but I had also made an enemy in the place where I spent most of my waking moments.

I envisaged some potentially difficult moments ahead.

Shortly after the Miguel/Manolo episode, another English girl started work at the restaurant.

Only a bit older than me, Sam had lived in Mallorca for over two years and yet barely spoke an intelligible word of Spanish.

It shouldn’t really have been a surprise – I had already noticed that there was a huge number of British people living and working there who had made absolutely no effort to learn the language.  It wasn’t hard to see that for some, it would be all too easy to move to the island whilst labouring under the impression that they had simply decamped to a warmer version of Britain.

British pubs, Fish ’n’ Chip shops on every corner, karaoke – even British supermarkets. It was amazing. A frightening majority of British holidaymakers went out for pie and chips in the evenings and then onto the pub to watch Only Fools and Horses on the pub television, drink Stella and eat Walkers crisps: the only thing differentiating between their holiday and a typical weekend back in Bognor (or wherever they hailed from), being the vivid red stripes front and back that they obtained from lying on the beach for six hours every day.

In fact my countrymen seemed to belong to the only nation in the world incapable of sunbathing in a rational way. They arrived in all their glorious pastiness, absolutely barbecued themselves on the first day, and then winced around for the rest of their holiday, painfully peeling scarlet thighs from the plastic pub chairs every time another packet of pork scratchings was called for. Just glimpsing their angry-looking epidermis was enough to make my eyes water in sympathy.

Anyway, back to Sam; who certainly made a very pleasant change from Isabella, the dour Italian girl who was my only female waitressing companion for a few days way back at the beginning of May. At least now I had someone with whom to huddle in the corners and bitch about Miguel in English.

Towards the middle of September, the atmosphere in the restaurant had got even frostier.

This new English posse was beginning to notice that when tips day arrived at the end of each week, all the other members of staff received an excitingly full envelope of bank notes from the bosses, who made it their business to tally up and distribute.

We, on the other hand, always seemed to end up with a bag of low-denomination coins, amongst which we never failed to find nestling a depressing quantity of single pesetas. Coins that were worse than useless – a thousand of the fiddly little buggers only adding up to the equivalent of about five pounds sterling at the time.

Any foreign coins that had been placed in the tips jar by stingy tourists also found their way into our envelopes as if by magic.

But when we challenged Vicente and Tomeo about it, another revelation came our way – despite the fact that we were the main staff out on the restaurant floor, communicating with the customers in a language they could actually understand; fetching their bread baskets, their cutlery, their water and their wine; serving their soup, ladling out their paella, answering their queries, dealing with their complaints and cleaning up their crumbs and spillages – Sam and I were only actually being allocated one portion of tips between us.

Of course evil Miguel from Valladolid derived an almost unhealthy satisfaction from seeing such proof of our lowly position on the food chain…

And that made being diddled out of our rightful tips about a hundred times worse.