Customer service

“Thank you for taking the time to complete our Feedback form” gushed the letter which arrived this morning from our bank. It continued “I am of course delighted to learn that you are extremely satisfied with the service you receive”

There’s only one small problem with that, which is that I never got round to filling in the feedback form. It’s still sitting on the desk waiting for the attention it is now unlikely to receive.

We are satisfied with the service we receive from our business bank though. When we were deciding which bank to use, we narrowed it down to two. Both have Scotland in their names. I phoned the Jedburgh branch of the one that doesn’t have “Royal” in its name and found myself directed to a call centre somewhere who didn’t know where Jedburgh was (understandable) and couldn’t answer any of my questions (less so).

Next I phoned the Jedburgh branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland and found myself speaking to someone in the Jedburgh branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. And they could answer all our questions. So we use them.

Nice day today.

Divergence

I’ve started another blog here to separate the hotel stuff from the (increasingly prevalent) baby stuff.

Pointy things

Darts. Good for business, good for the social life of the town and good for the local painter filling in all the wee holes in the wall where people miss> We’ve been here three years and this is the first time we’ve been part of the darts league. The first year we arrived just too late to register, the second we put a sign up in the bar, but no-one was interested and last year we almost got a team together. This year it’s finally happened. Gary and Liam from our local butchers have organised things and the first home game is tonight. We’ve laid on pizza and sausage rolls to keep the punters happy.

What else? Well, apart from connecting the cider keg to the Kronenbourg line while cleaning the lines (first time in three years that’s happened!) it’s been a fairly quiet day. Only ten days until our holiday - hurrah!

Painless

We’ve a group staying with us all week. Five of them. They’re working at the local factory, the one that makes coathangers. They’re working nightshift. They come home early in the morning and go to bed. They don’t need breakfast and Shirley can’t get in to clean their rooms cos they’re asleep. Occasionally we give them clean towels. If only all guests were that easy to please.

Closures and openings

The fruit shop has closed, the off license has closed, the paper shop is closing soon and one of the two flower shops is closed. However, Jacksons, the deli at the square is back open again having been closed for over a year. Colin and Debs used to run it, now it’s Philip and Deborah. We hope it’ll go well for them.

Countdown

Less than six weeks until junior is due to make her or his grand entrance to the world. Of course it could be a couple of weeks either side of that, but we should have our addition to the human race by Christmas. Lorna’s folks are arriving from SA at the beginning of December and are spending Christmas with us. Meanwhile, Tracy and Gillian our barpersons, have been showering us with baby related goodies. We have a cot, a playpen, several tons of cute baby clothes and, courtesy of the freecycle network, a pram. All free gratis. The only major item we’ve had to buy is a car seat.

Cold

Yesterday morning it was below freezing although our trailing begonias in the window boxes are refusing to die. Come to think of it, they’re refusing to trail either - they grow straight up. We’ve been lucky enough to have three very mild winters here, so it might be time for our luck to run out.

Oh, and…

it’s our third anniversary at the Spread. It’s been quite an adventure!

Comments

Duncan, thank you for your comments on allocation. That works fine if your company is the sole source of bookings, but we get quite a lot of people just looking at our website and phoning us directly. Some of them look at your website and then phone us directly too:-) And in the summer a lot of folk just walk in and ask for a room. So we have to keep the allocated rooms to one or, at most, two to avoid problems.

And another thing…

We use coloured chopping boards in the kitchen to prevent cross contamination. Red for raw meat, yellow for cooked meat, blue for fish - you get the idea. White is for bread. But what to do if you’re STARVING and the white board’s in the dishwasher?

Right, I’ve just decided that bread rolls are officially root vegetables. Anyone have a problem with that? Good.

Blood sweat and tears

Lorna has been jabbing things into her fingers at strategic times of day. The reason for this is that her blood glucose tolerance test returned a very slightly higher result than expected so she has to monitor it until the hospital says she can stop. The fact that the results obtained from these tests have been absolutely normal is reassuring, but may not be enough to keep the hospital happy.

Since my usual working practice is to run about like a battery powered toy and then fall over, she suggested I try it. I wasn’t keen - sticking needles in myself, particularly when I didn’t have to, wasn’t my idea of fun. But it’s worth noting that when I sliced my finger on the top of the shower screen support in Room 5 while cleaning this morning, the first thing I looked for was not the first aid kit, but Lorna with her little machine. My blood glucose was 4.7 which is neither unusually high or unusually low. Good.

What was less good, was that today, after breakfast, I had to do the cleaning since it’s Shirley’s day off. Only four rooms and I was done by 1.30, but I was running on willpower rather than blood glucose by the end. Fortunately there was time for a much needed sleep this afternoon.

And we have 10 guests tonight some of whom, no doubt, will want dinner.  I’d better get going…

Shell shocked (warning - may contain puns)

An early breakfast for three of our guests this morning was thrown into chaos by four other guests, who hadn’t asked for an early breakfast turning up at the same time. Five eggs (amongst other things) to cook. Placed five egg rings on the griddle, broke five eggs into them. One burst - oh well, it happens. I went downstairs, fetched a few more eggs and found that, in my absence a second one had burst. I moved it out of the way and as I did so, a third one went “pop”. Egg-sploded with the yolk flying in the air and landing… on top of the fourth one. That was totally unegg-spected. Whether the reaction was egg-sothermic I don’t know egg-zactly, but it caused a fair about of egg-zasperation and a few muttered egg-spletetives. The supply of eggs being egg-zausted, I went downstairs and got some egg-stra ones.

Egg-zit stage left.

Busy

Fitba
Football’s always good for the bar trade and todays match between Scotland and Ukraine (3-1 to us) was no exception. The bar is still busy and it’s shaping up to be a good night.

Food
Meanwhile in the kitchen I’ve been a busy fellow. I’ve made carrot and coriander soup, chicken liver pate, apple crumble (well, the apple bit), cottage pie filling, pesto and some boiled onion puree which is a constituent of our curries. The curry will be made next week - probably.

Faffing about
Meanwhile I’ve been trying to install the latest, hot off the presses version of Mandriva Linux on what will soon be the main office computer. Or it may become a paperweight… or a shot putt if things don’t improve soon.

Finally (but not leastly)
I suppose I really should mentione to people who don’t already know that we are on the point of becoming parents. December 4th is when it’s all supposed to happen and it’s not all clear how we’re going to keep the hotel running once junior makes his/her grand entrance. We’re on holiday for a week at the start of November and Lorna is officially Not Working from then on.

Duncan, thanks for your comments on an earlier post. Yes, in an ideal world all bookings would be by allocation, but until now we’ve been a bit wary of double bookings. With things quietening down we decided that now would be a good time to try it and it’s brought in a good few bookings that might not otherwise have been made. In fact the only double booking I’ve made in the past six months was on a room which was sold on referral.

Colourful

Here’s a clue as to what I’ve been doing. A batch of medium hot lamb curry with spinach called palak gosht was the result and it’s required a degree of self control to avoid eating it all ourselves. Once you’ve stood over a cauldron of bubbling home made curry you’ll never want to buy one of these little plastic trays from the supermarket again.
Four people were booked in courtesy of… wait for it… visitscotland! Well, they were from the TIC, but vs count it as one of their bookings.
Meanwhile, as a diversion, this letter arrived at the hotel the other day. A new definition of personal service perhaps!

Peace and quiet

The curse of Sundays struck again yesterday - no guests. Her ladyship was in no state to serve breakfast anyway having lost her voice due to an annoyingly persistent cold. She headed for the doctor’s while I caught up on sleep.
It’s looking like a quiet week at present, although two bookings came in this morning. You can guess where from!

Back to the gradings debacle. I’m having a look at the guidelines which are, frankly, anything but clear. Let’s take a look at a few of the categories to see what’s required…

Now then, I’ve made this a bit bigger than usual so you can read it. It’s worth noting that this is from a July 2005 version and the guidelines have probably been changed a couple of hundred times since then.

Breakfast: well, we ask guests to choose what they want when they come down for breakfast, we offer hot drinks and toast and we clear the tables promptly. So looking at these guidelines we’d score 4 star. But the assessor didn’t stay the night, so he didn’t have breakfast, so we weren’t graded on it.

Departure: My hand-knitted computerised reservations and point of sale system will produce an itemised bill for the guests, we’re happy to accept almost any form of payment (except Amex) and, Oh dear! “Exchange of pleasantries upon departure!”  How quaint! So that would be a 4 again except that the assessor didn’t check out cos he didn’t check in so we weren’t graded on that either.

In any case, the guidelines are laid out so that if we scored 5 stars in 79 out of 80 categories and 1 star in the eightieth one, then we’d still be one star. We could have mirrors on the ceilings and pink champagne on ice, but if the front of the building needs painted it would count for nothing. It does all appear a bit nonsensical.

Guests occasionally ask, during the exchange of pleasantries on departure, how many stars the hotel has, but as far as we know few make a booking solely on that basis.

Five weeks until our holiday. We’re going to the same self catering cottage we stayed at last year. It’s wonderfully relaxing with a swimming pool and hot tub in the garden. How many stars does it have? Don’t know, don’t care. Neither do the owners since the whole year’s booked out by March.

During the past three years we’ve aimed to please the people who’ve stayed with us. Judging by the comments in our visitors book it’s been quite successful. Attempting to conform to a set of ever changing guidelines instead is probably a recipe for insanity.

We have three guests so far tonight. I must remember to exchange pleasantries with them at breakfast tomorrow.