March 2003. The screen of my computer started to flicker, and a popup banner appeared:

Winner Winner Winner Winner Winner Winner.

I should have known better. There are no winners, nothing is for free, and one doesn’t honestly earn one’s bread even by working one’s ass off. Anyhow, I somehow got dragged into this nonsense and I signed up for a ‘free’ holiday in Florida (excluding flight, car rental, port call duties and God knows what). I hated package tours, but unfortunately my wife wanted to explore this plastic-covered swamp plus the unavoidable must-do Disney experience.

May 2003. We arrived in Orlando from Houston, rented a Thrifty van and found our hotel under the rain. At the reception desk they were about to hand our reserved rooms to someone else. We were late, so they told us.

Tired from travel

Looking for a friend, a smile

Standard bedroom

The next morning we were told to register at the tour office. I learned that our ‘free’ hotel room was paid by an advertising company. It was part of the deal, the concierge said. I had to bring a voucher signed by a tour operator.

Otherwise I would have to cover the hotel check (what a nice reminder, and what a lovely smile).

I took the family to the registration center, four hundred yards from the hotel. A gentleman of curly dark hair stood behind the simple desk. His eyes were false-blue, tainted by colored plastic lenses. It fitted well his pitchy, arrogant Latino voice:

“If you want to reside free, you must go tomorrow to the 90 minutes presentation and promotion tour. That’s what you signed. If you don’t like the deal, go.”

I looked into the false blue eyes of this young, angry man, and a Spanish sentence came to my mind: alla en Cuba los llaman gusanos.

Vacation for us

Money making for others

Parasites abound

“This is my vacation,” I replied as calmly as I could. “We don’t want to waste our precious vacation time with silly marketing stuff.”

“You are free to go,” screeched the gusano from the Orlando welcome center.

“This is f….. blackmail,” I replied. “I’m your customer, and I have paid quite some money to fill the empty holes in this so-called free holiday package. I’ll have to report your behavior.”

The man’s face turned purple. He gesticulated and brushed through his greasy curly hair. Then his face exploded in anger. “Write what you want!” he shouted. “Here is the form for complaints. Take it. It will go right here,” pointing toward the trash bin. In the meantime, my son Carl churned like a wasp through the shop and made a mess out of all kinds of Disney plastic junk on display. I didn’t feel like blaming him, at this very moment.

My wife Melanie, silent until this point, gave the man an icy look, and said, whilst throwing the papers back over the counter, in French, “don’t waste your time with this idiot.”

We left the welcome center. And here we were, stuck in Orlando and facing the ugly, miserable, angry but truthful edge of low-budget vacation.

Vacation station

Letters, mails, and blablabla

Service Funeral

Somewhere down the line there is no escape. Deep down on the ladder there is a point where problems can’t be resolved with paperwork. Someone has to dig the daily tourist shit for five bucks an hour. We had landed in a world, where business is low, and every cent is squeezed out of nothing through thousands of opaque marketing deals. The spoiled me & wife & kids just met the ugly edge of reality, not more than that. I almost felt compassion for the gusano.

I had enough for the day, and this mornings ‘free package presentation tour’ was already over. Thanks God. A while later we went to visit Disney World. The rain stopped and we stood in the line leading to the Magic Kingdom entry gates. It was almost foggy, which gave the scene a certain charm.

Alligator country

Towered by plastic castles

Ephemeral fun

Then we squeezed into the obese, sweating mainstream flanked by Mickey, Goofy and Pluto. Our kids had quite some fun, and the day went by quickly. My stomach was a bit upset from varieties of sugar food, and Melanie’s back gave her pain as a result of a bumpy ‘Africa Safari.’

Surprising vision

Artificial scenes and colors

Leave me tired and void

This said I only had succeeded in postponing, but not solving my involuntary marketing misery. In the evening, I made up my mind to find out more, and plan the next day.

“The tour starts at 10:30 am,” said the lady at the hotel desk with the name tag Betsy-Ohio. She pointed in direction of the parking lot. “It’s somewhere near that little bridge over there, where the lights glimmer.” 

“Please show me, I don’t see anything,” I mumbled. Betsy-Ohio came over to my side. “Well, this is strange. Someone must have turned the lights off. You’ll find it in the morning.” She was friendly, but a little shy.

“Who is organizing this stuff,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, yawning. “We’re working with hundreds of marketing companies. We only do deal with hotel reservations. Make sure you bring your signed yellow voucher tomorrow. Otherwise we have to charge you the room rate for two nights, and without any discount.”

I didn’t feel like arguing with Betsy-Ohio.  She was a lovely country girl, we were equally trapped in our individual miseries, and both of us were tired.

The next morning the courtesy coffee burned in my stomach as I walked, in company of my family, in direction of the meeting point. But there was nobody. Finally I saw a hotel employee crossing the lawn. Her name was Dolores-Nevada. She pointed me in the direction of a pink trailer-bungalow, and that’s where the tour started.

A sales representative appeared. He introduced himself with a cheesy smile, name tag Keith-Oklahoma, and led my family to another room with separate tables. He was a man in his thirties. He had a round face, a large mouth and water-blue eyes. He reminded me of an actor, who always plays crooked gamblers in Hollywood movies. His light blue shirt, adorned with a red tie, looked sweaty.

“I hear you are living in Texas. I’ve worked in Texas, too, south of Dallas, selling cattle. I’ll have the honor to coach you during today’s vacation home presentation.” He gave me another cheesy grin.  As soon as we sat down our kids messed up the table and spilled corn flakes and milk in direction of O-Keith.

“Well,” he said, “you might consider putting your children in the playroom, so that we can talk business.”

That’s where I went with Carl and Sarah. Carl jumped toward the toys, followed by Sarah toddling behind.

On the surface

Everything is done to seduce you

With empty heart and tired soul

“Is she potty-trained?” inquired a raspy voice originating from a corner of the room. It belonged to an elderly lady, who scrutinized us with sixties-style-edgy-wing glasses.

“No, she isn’t,” I replied. “Good morning, by the way.”

“We only take kids of two years and older,” the ugly spider remarked. “Have a wonderful day,” I replied and pulled my complaining kids away from the toys. O-Keith wasn’t thrilled. He had started already his sales story, and Melanie pretended to listen. This marketing shit really started to bite on our nerves. I happily observed my kids messing up the table again, peeling bananas and emptying little sugar bags. O-Keith gave them an angry glance and recommenced his marketing stuff.

“We are introducing you to a tremendous new opportunity, which is called vacation time-sharing. No more hotel bills! No more inflationary vacation costs. We have a world-wide range of locations.” Indeed, a world map behind his back on the wall was full of red dots, clustering in the USA, Argentina, Israel, South Africa and Tibet. I wondered if they had hired property on the Golan Highs, or the ruins of the Drepung Monastery. He continued to praise his stuff for a while and showed a green paper.

“These are our realtor’s accreditation documents. Please, look here: the name of Governor Jeff Bush.” The Governor’s signature was missing. He rapidly withdrew the paper, like a gambler would pull back a set of cards, and said: “Let’s go and have a little boat trip over the lotus lake to show you some of our finest luxury apartments. You can own any of these units for 75000 RCA points for one week per year.”

I didn’t insist to see everything there was to be seen. The whole thing was nothing but a bad, silly comedy for me and I decided to make Oklahoma-Keith a little suffer.

He took as to a jetty, and we boarded a speed boat. The lake was murky, but beautiful lotus flowers were blossoming all around. O-Keith presented us to the captain. He steered the boat over the murky waters. After a while, O-Keith said: “We have plenty of alligators in here. If you don’t sign up with us, you have to swim back.. Just a joke, hahaha.”

I didn’t say anything, just nodded. O-Keith brought back the discussion to the subject of vacation sharing.

“This is Orlando, the sunset lagoon, one of the nicest spots in the world. It’s a prime location of world class. You can always trade your local RCA points against any other RCA point location in the world. Disney is a superb tourism magnet.”

I just nodded, and let him talk, saving my ammunition for later. He guided us to a bungalow apartment, which was quite pretty, good style indeed. It had a hexagonal configuration, and a Jacuzzi in the patio. In wanted to know the value of the property, but didn’t receive an answer.

“This particular property is not for vacation sharing, it just serves as a show model.”

Now I really smelled a rat. These crooks had booked a visit tour for this pretty apartment only to lure customers into their filthy marketing web.

“I would like to see one of the apartments, which are owned by your company,” I said both out of evil curiosity and revenge. We walked to a five-story concrete building, which didn’t look quite as glamorous.

“Who takes care of these apartments?” I inquired cunningly.

“We have very good maintenance contractors, for every aspect of housekeeping” said O-Keith, nodding.

This was the trap I had prepared for O-Keith. At the third floor we stepped out of the elevator, and headed for the vacation apartment. There wasn’t much fantasy in the construction. A regular three-bedroom flat, kitchen, view over some shrubs, gardens and other fairly ugly concrete buildings of the same kind.

Above the entry door, hundreds of spiders nested in cobwebs.

Elusive contractors

Spiders settle with pleasure

Above vacation homes

“Mr. Keith, could you tell me what these insects are,”

I asked with an evil smile.

“They are.. cob.., yes cobwebs, spiders, I presume,” he answered.

“Perhaps you might have a word with your maintenance contractor,” I said.

I seriously doubted that there was any contractor.

O-Keith nodded, and didn’t say anything.

We walked down the stairs, squeezed in a small Chevy, and returned to the pink paper bungalow. What followed was another hour of coercing tactics.

Finally O-Keith called his boss, a tired and booze-smelling man with plenty of gold rings, and we had to listen to the same old bullshit again in stereo. “For only $ 7500, you earn 100000 RCA points, which gives you two weeks of vacation per year, in the blue period.”

I really had enough, not to speak about Melanie, who felt completely pissed. I pulled my pocket calculator on the table, and said:

“OK, you say there are 85 parties who share the ownership. Let’s assume your low-rise cobweb apartment has a value of $ 125000. Let’s divide 125000 through 85. It makes $ 1471, right? Plus cobweb removal and telephone booking services, and your cut, perhaps $ 2500. You haven’t explained me why I should pay $ 7500 for a property-value-share of $ 2500.

The men looked at each other. O-Keith mumbled something with a tired voice, than pointed to the assistant’s room. There they signed my yellow voucher, reluctantly.

Betsy-Ohio smiled when I showed her the voucher.

“They didn’t get you, right?” 

“Not this time,” I replied smiling.

An innocent smile

Received at a gray and boring place

Joy reconciled.

We skipped the entire ‘free’ follow-up in Daytona Beach, where another marketing campaign awaited us. We went instead to the Florida Keys, where the color of the sea is of genuine, mesmerizing blue.

© 2004 by Franz L. Kessler