Keeping it Real

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take me very long at all to get into the swing of life on the Costa del Sol.

Constant sunshine and a close proximity to the Mediterranean sea – a mere two-minute amble from my front door – couldn’t fail but bring about an almost instantaneous feeling of renewed health and vitality; even though my asthma would continue to plague me for years to come.

Far from feeling trapped in the gruesomeness of a package-holiday destination, my small corner of Marbella turned out to bear far more resemblance to a Spanish village; and I soon got to know plenty of familiar faces with whom to exchange cheery pleasantries as I popped in and out of local shops and business or peacefully sat, eyeing up my new surroundings, café con leche steaming aromatically at my elbow.

Even more familiar faces were added to my mental Rolodex when I began taking the bendy bus down to Guadalmina and back every day – a nauseous start to the day if ever there was one, especially if a tardy sprint left me with a backwards facing pew, standing room only, or, heaven forfend, perched on the concertina itself.

The advent of my employment at Intereality (not its real name, but the name by which it will be known here in the interests of avoiding upsets of a legal nature) quite convinced me that all my Christmases, and possibly even Birthdays too, had come at once: from being an impoverished part-time receptionist, there I suddenly was, earning the ransom of a minor Duke (at least) in order to do a job that was no worse than any of my previous jobs, even if my colleagues were a bit of a disappointment to me in my quest for an authentic Spanish experience.

For with the exception of the Marketing Co-ordinator, who was a white Zimbabwean girl; and the exotic receptionist who was half Spanish, half Portuguese, brought up in France; the rest of my colleagues were unmistakably British, and proud of it.

Many of them had already been on the Costa del Sol for quite a number of years, and despite their relative youth (their ages ranged from 23 to 40) I was one of the few people in the office who could make herself understood in Spanish and almost certainly  the only employee who was actually fluent in the language (with the exception of the aforementioned exotic receptionist).

Yes, I admit my joy at being paid enough to cover my rent, bills and expenses – after two years of penury – with even a smidgen left over with which to treat myself to a new thread or three on occasion, was dulled just a little at the realisation that I had unwittingly been sucked into the very environment that I had spent the previous years trying to avoid: The Thriving Ex-pat Enclave.

But by niftily side-stepping all social overtures from my workmates, I managed to limit my dealings with them to nothing more Anglofied than getting on with the job in hand.

My main tasks entailed assisting the Marketing Co-ordinator (who, as her title suggests, was loads more important that the humble Marketing Assistant – me) to organise our presence at the overseas property exhibitions the company attended every couple of weeks and dealing with all the overseas advertising, as well as also being responsible for a variety of office-based administrative chores of varying degrees of importance and an unwaveringly high degree of tedium.

So far, so simple, you would have thought.

However, as time went on, I found myself becoming more and more concerned by the emotional state of my superior who, despite holding the lofty title of Marketing Co-ordinator, didn’t actually seem to be coordinating very much at all, or indeed holding her own in any discernible way.

In fact it was becoming ever more apparent that the poor girl was slowly losing any semblance of the marbles she must surely once have possessed.

In my youthful arrogance, I had supposed that the spells of uncontrollable weeping, the permanently shaking hands and the alarmingly panic-stricken eyes were all down to an unbalanced psychological constitution and a general unsuitability for the natural stresses and strains incurred by such a job.

But it wasn’t until she hurled herself bodily from the office one day, besodden by a torrent of tears and having left a barely civil letter of resignation in the centre of her empty desk, that I was unwittingly set on the path towards finding out more about the circumstances leading to her distressed state of mind, and ultimately to her abrupt departure.

For no sooner had the door slammed behind her, than I was offered her job…

As unquestioningly naïve as I no doubt still was at the tender age of twenty-two and a bit, I was absolutely delighted at my unexpected promotion at work.

Who wouldn’t have been? More money and a swankier title to print on the rather pointless business cards; what more could a nearly twenty-three year old ask for.

What more indeed.

The first month went extremely well: I thoroughly enjoyed my new organisational role and, having watched my predecessor closely, I already had a fair idea of the improvements that might contribute to the smooth running of things.

The company had long taken stands at the major UK property exhibitions, and I was also asked to begin organising private shows at hotels and other small venues throughout the UK and Ireland: choosing venues, booking venues, designing stands, advertising, organising colleagues; even the odd “business meeting” – what an ego-boosting buzz after years of lugging plates from restaurants kitchens to restaurant tables and back again!

But then the rot began to set in…

One aspect of my change in circumstance was being thrown into much closer contact with the boss.

An English woman who had been married to a Spaniard for ten years, she was a blonde and sassy power-dresser-type in her mid-forties (although she would never have owned up to the latter) with a rather large dollop of what could only be described as attitude.

I was already prepared for the fact that she would not be the easiest of people to work alongside, but absolutely nothing could have equipped me for the reality of having to deal with that woman (who, in the interests of avoiding upsets of a legal nature, will be referred to here as Mavis) for over forty hours a week.

As the months progressed, the volume of work stacking up in my solitary little department also began to take on a life of its own.

From one exhibition every two weeks, it had slowly crept up to two or three every weekend; and from just being the UK and Ireland, we began attending exhibitions in Dubai, Hong Kong and even the US.

I suddenly found myself desperately attempting to manoeuvre three different groups of people, with their corresponding exhibition equipment, to destinations that on occasions turned out to be on three different continents.

Things went wrong, as they have a wont to do when time is both of the essence while also being the one thing you have not got enough of, so I asked for help. After all, there were two of us doing the job back when it was infinitely less complicated, so I reasoned that having a little assistance now the going had got three times as tough would be perfectly acceptable.

I was wrong.

Mavis, in her infinite wisdom, always managed to find more important tasks for my brand new ‘assistants’ to perform: whisking them away from under my nose after a matter of days to install them in some department or other that were declared more needy of assistance.

Then the phone calls started, at all hours of the day and well into the night.

I even found myself in the ludicrous position of sitting in my Marbella apartment at eleven o’clock one evening, being instructed to ring a York (UK) taxi company to pick up the imperious Mavis from outside York Minster and take her back to her hotel. On many occasion the phone calls were nothing but a volley of shouted abuse when something had gone wrong on the stands, or when the (only the swankiest will do) hotel suite I had booked for her was not up to standard.

She then began sending abusive faxes to the office – timing them to ensure that I would be the very last of my colleagues to read them – outlining how useless I was at my job in the most inventively colourful language.

Then I started coming into work to find her dirty laundry on my chair, so I returned it to her office.

It returned to my chair the next morning.

I put it back in her office.

And so it went on, until she eventually saw fit to inform me that taking her laundry to the dry cleaners was now part of my job description.

I refused.

She yelled.

I quit.

And there you have it: the reason for my former colleague’s departure in a nutshell.

It transpired that the reason Mavis got away with that and so much other astonishingly unprofessional behaviour was because she was sleeping with the Managing Director, much to the chagrin of her husband – finding yourself part of a tired old cliché must bring you down to earth with a bit of a bump.

But in the end it didn’t do any of them much good – the company expanded way beyond its means and predictably (and satisfyingly) went noisily bust a few years after I stomped out.