That time I worked in a fancy hotel in St Moritz
Terrible jobs I used to have - episode 4
The story so far:
That time I worked in a truckstop with strippers
That time I worked in a German steel plant
That time I worked in a Nebuliser factory
Hang on, terrible jobs? Isn’t this occasional series meant to cover hardship, life lessons and the honest toil that made me the man I am today? Surely an expensive hotel in the Swiss alps is a bit off-topic?
Well okay, yes, but among the rich is no place to be if you have no money at all. And if your boss is an arse.
I had spent a good chunk of the previous two years working in a range of menial jobs abroad – essentially anything that would allow me to delay for as long as possible accepting reality, going home and getting a real job.
So the first three months of 1996 were to be spent in a fancy hotel in a village just outside St Moritz, one of the first ever ski resorts, host of the 1948 Winter Olympics and a place known for its high-end living.
I started well, flying to the wrong end of Switzerland, having assumed that my destination was near Geneva rather than Zurich and therefore spending an entire day travelling by train across Switzerland to get to Chur and then into the Engadin valley.
And as usual, I had turned up penniless, reasoning that the job itself was well-paid and that I would pick up plenty of tips along the way, based on my previous experience of doing a similar job in Bavaria. I quickly learned to my dismay that the Swiss do not tip; and furthermore that the hotel manager had decided he would pay me in full at the end of my three-month stint there, rather than the weekly or monthly wage I had expected.
The job included room and dinner, but beyond that I had not a centime to my name, having spent my last few francs on the extended train journey to get here.
I should acknowledge that, clearly, every bit of this misfortune was my own stupid fault. Who moves to another country without any money? Well, just me, I think.
I had in fact done something very similar just five months earlier, arriving on a one-way bus ticket to Bavaria for a job that didn’t exist and less than fifty quid in my pocket, and thirty-six hours to find work before the pavements became my bed. That’s a story for another time, but I had singularly failed to learn the lessons life had offered me.
The work in Switzerland wasn’t too bad – a mix of odd-jobs in the hotel, fetching guests from the airstrip in the valley, moving luggage around and a couple of night shifts per week on reception as Night Porter. I was occasionally offered treats like breaking up all the ice on the pavement outside (for which I was given an actual pickaxe just like a real dwarf).
Necessity is the mother of invention and I began to employ a series of creative tactics to scrape together food and money to get me through the month, and the night shifts did offer some helpful opportunities.
The first was the kitchen – although I wasn’t offered the use of the catering facilities at night, it remained unlocked, so there was scope for some pilfering, as long as I covered my tracks. I started by helping myself to some of the individual jam pots and the odd tea bag.
After a few nights, once I was confident that my low-level crime was undetected, I graduated to using the slicing machine, removing a couple of millimetres from the huge hams that were kept in the fridge. The art here was cleaning the machine properly afterwards – I was pretty sure they didn’t measure the ham itself at the start and end of the day.
Phase 2 was the hotel cellar, where all the bottles from the bar and restaurant were stored for recycling. I didn’t ever consider raiding the bar supplies themselves (that would have been stealing, after all) but many of the beer and soda empties had small deposits on them, which could be exchanged for a cash at the small supermarket up the road.
As long as I didn’t do too many, and went to different staff each time (as the shop assistants surely knew the hotel managers), I could get away with it. In my head there was a strange morality reminiscent of the Friends episode where Ross and Chandler go on a romantic weekend. They steal various bits from the fancy hotel room, and Chandler explains where the lines of acceptability are – soap yes, bedding no. Remote control no, batteries yes.
I was gradually able to scrape a few francs together, enough to be able to buy a few bits at the supermarket. Bread (to go with all that jam and ham I’d been swiping), chocolate, batteries for my Walkman. Did you know if you put batteries on the radiator you can get some more life out of them? I did. They do occasionally burst into flames, which is sub-optimal, but the surviving ones were good for another hour of Oasis at least.
What the lack of money also enabled was some creativity around entertainment. Guests often left books and magazines in their rooms on departure, so I let it be known among the housekeeping staff that I was in the market for any spare reading material. There was also a ‘library’ in the main bar – largely an ornament, but I did manage to borrow some good reads there in the dead of night, including some Sherlock Holmes stories and a couple of decent pulp thrillers.
I walked, a lot. I also discovered running for the first time. The Engadin valley is a huge, flat valley between two mountain ridges that in winter has the air of a snow-covered motorway. There’s never anyone there, apart from when the Engadin Skimarathon takes place, when hundreds of muscular Swiss don their cross-country skis for a 26-mile race along the valley.
The rest of the time, I could walk or run for miles without seeing another soul, either down the main valley or down any one of the dozens of side-valleys. I could hug trees. I could just – be.
The hotel, like many in the Alps, had been in the hands of the proprietors for many generations. Herr and Frau X had grown up in the hotel and therefore, now in their 50s, knew exactly what needed to be done, how and to what degree. Creativity was not to be encouraged, nor humour – there was a process for everything that had to be learned (although often without telling you what it was, and then shouting at you that they told you that yesterday).
I quickly learned that saying ‘ach so’ in response to an explanation (roughly equivalent to ‘ah, I see’) was guaranteed to enrage the boss if he thought he had said all this before (he often hadn’t but always thought he had).
After one uneventful nightshift, a guest on the 3rd floor phoned down to reception at about 6am. ‘Mein Heizkörper ist zerplatzt’, he informed me. Having lived in German-speaking countries for a while now, my German was pretty good. I knew that ‘Heizkörper’ meant radiator, and I wasn’t sure what that verb was but it must be some version of ‘not working’. The guest was a bit cold. Definitely a day shift problem.
A short while later more calls came in – someone on the 2nd floor seemed to have some sort of water problem, and a guest on the 1st floor was saying something about ceilings. But I was tired, it was almost the end of shift and I would shortly be able to smoothly hand this over, another night’s work well done.
Sure enough the hotel manager arrived to start his day – I gave him the night’s update, which he took in his stride until I hit the word ‘zerplatzt’. “What??” he cried, “which room?” He immediately ran off in that direction, his foreign nightporter trailing impotently behind him, vaguely aware that the reception phones were all ringing at the same time.
It turns out ‘zerplatzt’ means ‘exploded’. The poor man’s cast-iron radiator in his room had literally exploded. He had left his window slightly open, and the freezing air had hit the boiling radiator with catastrophic results.
By the time we got there his room was ankle-deep in hot water (just lie down mate, you’ll soon warm up), and rooms two floors down were now loudly wondering why water was pouring through their ceilings.
Although the hotel manager is to this day one of the worst people I’ve ever worked for, I can sympathise with him in this case – what a way to start your day. Although given it was regularly -20 at night, and every room had these old radiators, I couldn’t help wonder how this wasn’t a nightly occurrence?
Anyway, I ended up finishing my contract two weeks early ‘by mutual consent’ – it wasn’t a direct result of the radiator thing but we were both happy to bring a timely end to this debacle. I was handed all my pay – a small pile of thousand-franc notes (each worth about £500, thirty years ago). I walked down the hill to the train station with a song in my heart and a skip in my step, and with the wonderful feeling that it was over.
I concluded on the way back to England that it was probably time to start looking for a proper job, where I could earn some real money and maybe even finally get some damn respect. That bit took a while longer but we got there in the end.
Verdict: Switzerland is a beautiful country, but it’s no place to be poor. A bad boss can ruin a perfectly good job, and a terrible job can ruin a perfectly wonderful location. But the work wasn’t that bad in retrospect, plus I’m really good at slicing ham now.
I don’t know how many more of these you have left, but they are so entertaining!