the not very relaxing summer in the spa

"I'm afraid we need you to pay for your room NOW, sir," I said in my coldest voice.

Actually, I didn't say "sir" because we don't do that here in Finland. That was one thing I knew, although the rest of the hotel business in Finland was still all new to me. Despite the fact that I had extensive experience of the hotel business in other countries, I was fairly sure there were things all the other receptionists knew and I was clueless about.

And it wasn't only because I had only ever done this job in English-speaking countries and now had to learn (quickly) to do it in both Finnish and Swedish. Being a hotel receptionist is never easy. For every new workplace, you have to learn how to manage bookings and payments and several different computer systems, know all the rooms, restaurant menus and members of staff, act as private secretary to the boss, and be able to provide information about everything from package deals to local tourist sites to where deliveries should be stored to evacuation plans in case of fire.

All this after just a few days of on-the-job training by other receptionists who are often too busy to show you how things are done properly.

At least boredom is seldom one of the challenges.

Things I was still clueless about in this spa hotel included regulations and laws for this business. In Finland, there are lots of laws about everything. I wouldn't have been surprised to find I was the first employee who had not gone to hotel management school, and sometimes suspected I wasn't really supposed to be behind that reception desk at all. But I had never lied about it, and yet there I was.

There were a number of other things I did not understand either, despite my many years in hotels. Such as why they told me I could leave the desk for my lunch break, but then frowned when I did just that instead of just gulping down a sandwich and a yogurt in the back office like the others did. Or how I was told, the only day I called in sick because I was knocked out cold by the flu, that there was nobody else available so I'd better get my sorry ass in to work anyway. Or how there was never anyone else available to do almost anything at all, meaning that I had to leave the reception desk unattended for ages to go and set up an extra bed in a guest's room.

Or how I wasn't told, until after I started working there, that it wasn't a full-time job but only a few hours a week.

Or why I had to stand on my feet for the entire shift, even if it was the full eight hours.

But one thing I did know was that you don't let a guest check out in the morning with only a vague promise to come back and pay the bill "some time later". That's why I fixed this particular gentleman with a threatening stare. Only when he promised on all that is holy to come back in a couple of hours, and gave me his business card, did I relent.

The other receptionist, who had not witnessed our little altercation, gave a little gasp when she found the card lying around. It was a flashy one, gold-embossed and decorated with a symbol that I later learned has been listed as one of the world's ugliest monuments, a golden horseshoe. It turned out that the man I had more or less accused of trying to skip out without paying was Finland's arguably most successful businessman who almost single-handedly created one of the country's most visited - and weirdest - tourist sites, Tuuri.

A man who also kept his promise and came back an hour later to pay his bill.

I still have his card as a souvenir of that clueless, feet-aching summer in the spa hotel.