Fawlty Towers Patmos style.

I probably ought to explain to you why it is that at about 11pm on our last night in Patmos, Dale and I had 3 Greek men (hitherto unknown to us) in our hotel room. Most of our group had been for a very pleasant meal at a seaside restaurant just a few minutes walk from the hotel. We were back before 10pm, and I was keen not to have a late night, as I wanted an early morning swim before we checked out today. I retired soon after returning, and not long after that Dale tried to close the blind over our main window, using the buttons provided (all mechanized- it would have been so much simpler if there had just been a cord for us to pull!) We heard the motor whirring, but no movement of the blind in either direction.

I confess to not caring too much about the window myself, as we were not publicly visible and I was hoping to be up when it was light anyway, but Dale was, quite reasonably, keen to have some choice about when to have the room emblazoned with light, so she rang Reception to report the problem. A cheerful woman turned up a few minutes later, pushed a button or two, made a cursory attempt to pull, it down manually, and then announced that she was not a technician. She left soon after, promising to send a technician. He arrived about ten minutes later, and went through the same rigmarole of pushing buttons and yanking on the blind, all to no avail. I thought from his gesticulations that he said he was going to go and get a ladder, but when he reappeared a few minutes later, he had another man with him. One of them stood on a stool and was trying, (I think!) to manually roll the blind down, while the other continued to fiddle with the buttons. There was quite a bit of yelling between the two of them, which was not helpful to the person in the room who was still hoping to get to sleep.

At some point not long after, reinforcements must have been summoned because I noticed that there were now three blokes in the room and the TV was on. Dale reckons that the third man must have been in the middle of a favourite programme when he was called, since the first thing he did when he came in was to turn on the TV and change the channel. The yelling and yanking and pushing of buttons continued without much success but the process of manually unrolling the blind did seem to be gradually making progress, and eventually the blind was fully down, although looking decidedly the worse for wear (I noticed a rip in it this morning).
At that point, their duty done, the team headed out, no doubt relieved to be finished, and leaving us with the assurance that they would fix it in the morning. My own inspection of the apparatus this morning leads me to think that it will need total replacement, so I hope they are not needing the room for any new guests today!

Pleased to report that none of this impaired a very pleasant morning swim and an excellent breakfast.Read more