You can't please everybody

I guess I just wasn't made for these times!

For the last 6 years we have operated what we call a Bed & Breakfast in the National Historic family home that I own. The name is a little deceiving, I admit, because we have never served an actual cooked breakfast to anybody. Depending on how you book, we may put the fixings for a Continental Breakfast into our kitchenette area, although we do not do that for VRBO customers who are generally used to roughing it.

Notice I said “Kitchenette.” We make it clear in our advertising that we do not have a full kitchen. We have about a 10 cu. ft refrigerator/freezer, a microwave, a toaster and toaster oven, coffee and tea makers and a small kitchen table with chairs. We even have a kitchen sink, but no oven (although we do have a gas grill in the pool area.) Unfortunately not everybody reads the fine print in our listings.

We recently hosted a group of 9 people for two days who booked through VRBO. For all appearances they were having a great time. I went out of my way to accommodate them by giving them local recommendations for places to eat, a full tour of the house and even mowed a path for them to explore the lower pasture. Seeing that due to old age some of them were having trouble getting around to the back veranda, I even opened up a quicker path through the Dining Room which is normally not open to guests.

I got to feel quite comfortable with this jolly group and even cracked a few jokes. Big mistake! For those who know me personally, and just random readers can probably tell, I have kind of a twisted sense of humor. In person it comes off as very dry and many cannot tell when I am kidding. (Hint: I am usually kidding about 90% of the time!)

One of the guests told me that he had wandered down to my sister’s adjacent property to look at her horses. To be fair, there is no clear signage indicating that is a separate property other than a couple of barrels in the driveway. My sister, Susan, operates a riding academy on the property and for liability purposes she does not like any extra traffic around her stables, motorized or on foot.

She has the quite reasonable fear that someone will spook one of her horses and a student may fall off and get hurt. Horses are notoriously skittish about such things. In any case, knowing that she would not have been happy about the incursion I told the fellow, “You were lucky you did not get shot!”

To be clear, my sister is not insane, doesn’t walk around with a 6-gun strapped to her waist, and would probably not shoot anybody without a much better reason. It was a joke people! Maybe a bad one, but I wanted to convey that it would be a bad idea for anyone else to follow the first guest’s example.

The group checked out and for all I knew it was a very successful stay, that is until I read the review they posted on VRBO. I was labelled as, “a very unpleasant person,” with the statement about the stables quoted as proof. This was accompanied by a laundry list of complaints about the “kitchen,” the size of the refrigerator, the lack of a breakfast, and the general condition of the house (that it was “falling apart!”)

On the latter complaint, at least, they have a point. Houses that are 190 years old are in a continual state of falling apart, and it takes constant effort to keep up with the maintenance on a 13,000 square foot building (not to mention the 60-acre grounds!) They complained about a little plaster falling off the ceiling into the lobby. We have been aware of that problem but haven't been able to get ahold of a 14-foot step ladder to get up there to fix it.

I think part of the problem was again the advanced age of our guests. Some of them probably had trouble getting up the stairs, so the whole group tended to socialize downstairs in what they called our “sitting room.” It was never intended to be such, but it takes all kinds to make the world go round I guess.

So I suppose all this comes as a wake-up call that we need to catch up with some of the things on our list that we may have procrastinated about. First we need a clear sign on the barrels telling people that the stables are off limits. Then I guess we better fix that bad plaster in the front hall. Does anybody have a 14-foot step ladder we can borrow?

Changing the name to remove the words “Bed and Breakfast” is more of a problem since we have been listed that way for 6 years and our web site is
www.hartfordhousebedandbreakfast.com

As for me and my “unpleasant personality,” at age 74 there may not be a cure. It’s probably best if I don’t get too friendly with the guests and let my true personality show. That probably goes for a lot of my other business transactions with humans. As Brian Wilson said, “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.”

By the way: This post is just for my subscribers. I don’t plan to air my dirty linen with the whole world. And for the record, we generally get all 5 -star reviews and are rated as a SuperHost by both VRBO and AirBnB!

P.S. If you book a stay, just mention that you are a Substack subscriber and I will try to be more pleasant to you!