Hotel Reception 7: Here comes the bride

I was asked to work 3pm - 8pm at the weekend as the hotel was only going to have 1 old lady but was closed to everyone else on account of the boss's daughter getting married. I was there to provide a presence and to answer the phone. I thought the shifts were going to be easy with nothing to do but take calls. Little did I realise how wrong I was.

I found out that the reason the boss said the hotel was full was that the hotel was going to be used as free accommodation for the mainly Italian wedding guests as the boss's husband is Italian.

When I arrived, the morning receptionist told me that because the guests had eaten breakfast late, he had left half the washing-left undone. There were 32 guests and he asked me to lay the tables for the following day's breakfast.

The wedding guests assembled at 3:30pm and left at 5pm but 4 of them left with only 15 minutes - typically Latin.

I did not expect to see them again today.

However, most of them arrived a couple of hours later to be met with a power cut. Something had tripped the fuses. One of the guests tried to help as he is an electrical engineer. The old lady came to tell us she had no electricity. No doubt her personal air conditioning unit had stopped.

One of the guests is an electrical engineer so he tried to help with flicking the switches in the fuse box.

The guests asked for many beers and water, and had they understood French or English, I would have been assertive enough to ask them speak to the cook who would normally handle food and drink orders. Instead I had to run into the kitchen to request the drinks from the cook. As I was not behind the desk, the guests ended up going behind it to grab their room keys.

After 1/2 hr we managed to get the electricity back on.

P who I had replaced and who was due to replace me kept phoning me to as he didn't know who was replacing him the following morning as he had to look after his kids from 8 am. He had tried ringing the boss and her already-married daughter, who also manages the hotel but they weren't answering the mobiles. As he didn't have her number, he asked me to phone the bride. I didn't refuse but said she was busy. I did ring her brother and her youngest sister but they too were incommunicado.

When P arrived to replace me he tried phoning the boss and her family, to no avail. My contribution was to find the website for the chateau where the reception was being held and he phoned to leave a message to call back. I would have asked to speak to the boss as that happens in all good films, with a phone being brought to the table. As he had no response, he threatened to leave the following morning leaving the reception unstaffed.