FEEDBACK without BACK...

A few days ago I was having lunch with a friend in one of the most emblazoned establishments on the island, I won’t mention the name so as not to influence future judgements or ideas which in my opinion cannot be judged with just one visit. Between sitting down and the waiter arriving, 20 minutes had already passed, another 10 to give us a menu and another 10 to order something. To cut a long story short, we arrived at 2 p.m. and the first course was served over an hour later. The company was more than pleasant and so I did not mind the (wasted) time until it was time for coffee. Since we had been sitting for almost two hours and I am not in the habit of calling the waiters’ attention with gestures, raised hands and loud voices, when the waiter passed by the table I politely asked for two coffees. The reaction left me perplexed, without even turning around and with his back to us he said aloud: ‘eh one minute!’, there are moments and moments, and that moment for us had been a long and protracted wait, but it wasn’t that moment added to so many others that bothered me, but the tone in which he addressed us.

The (bitter) coffees then arrived together with the (salty) bill and the desire to go home and write my liberating revenge: a negative feedback on tripadvisor. For my part, I had invested time and money in a dining experience that was supposed to be monumental, instead it had turned into waiting and rudeness, especially thinking back to how difficult it had been to book at the day and time they wanted since the week was practically all overbooked.

Yet my friend, an expert connoisseur of Palma’s venues, told me that we had been ‘unlucky’ and had sat in the wrong seat, that he was a regular at the place and that the experience did not reflect the reality of the venue and staff. In fact both the food and the beverage were of a high standard and perhaps the visit had been ‘unfortunate’ yet I still nurtured in me the urge to write a negative review to punish what I considered an injustice. As I drove the car home I remembered the wonderful trip we had taken to Italy and the wonderful places we had visited, none of which I had reviewed with positive feedback. We had had a superb experience and had not felt the need to pay tribute to our treatment in any way, but now that the opposite had happened I already had my hands on the keyboard ready to draw up my judgement. It’s true what they say: a positive experience you tell one person and a negative one you tell ten.

When I sat down in front of the PC a few hours later to work, I weighed my thoughts, put my words in my pocket and metaphorically closed my mouth, I went to search in my mind for the name of that wonderful castle in Italy (Semivicoli) and gave vent to a beautiful 5-dot review. Unfortunately, in a world that goes at the speed of light, with less and less time for ourselves, a bad experience (and an expensive one at that) appears not as a scam but as a theft of that time that we insist on chasing and second chances are not contemplated for fear of finding ourselves in the same situation.

One important thing I have learnt from this little story is that when bad experiences happen to you, you are even more inclined to appreciate the good ones, those places with a soul that made you feel good, cuddled and transported… and that you should always give a second chance, if only to confirm that there are better places and maybe be surprised and understand (as my friend says) that you were just ‘unlucky’.