One thing I really dislike is busy people who don’t think other people are busy. You know the ones: Keep you waiting forever without calling to say they’ll be late; tell you half an hour after they should have been there that they’re not going to turn up, never answer your emails or text messages for weeks, then suddenly call you saying yes, let’s go ahead in half an hour! That kind of thing.
I try not to care too much and not take it personally (although I do have rejection issues) - after all, this is Hong Kong. Right? But I have to say the Four Seasons Hotel really takes the cake.
I wrote them a polite email two weeks ago asking if I could film a Cantonese teaching video for 15 minutes in their lobby at a time of day when it’s not busy. (Probably never but that’s what I wrote.) Low moustache ratio (one) - nothing heavy.
After a week I got an email from a PR geezer saying he had received my request but needed to discuss it with three other people.
Four days after that again, I emailed him asking if they could tell me as soon as possible because if they said no, I would have to ask other hotels (that little segment of the film should be set in some kind of up-market venue) and that I’d only approached the Four Seasons so far - it being the most beautiful in HK (and my “local” hotel, i.e. closest to my ferry pier. I believe in supporting your local enterprises whenever possible.)
This morning, 16 days after my initial request, I received a phone call from the hotel.
“I want to thank you for your kind interest in our hotel, we really appreciate it” etc.
Great!
“It’s so good of you to choose us … blah blah..”
BUT?
“We receive so many requests of this type and we say no to all of them.”
So why not tell me at once? Why not have a standardised email saying thanks but no? Why go through the rigmarole of pretending to be discussing it? Why did they think that wasting my time was okay?
I can assure you that I wasted no time in saying thanks a lot, goodbye.
If we could have gone ahead with the filming we would have had lunch in the coffee shop afterwards, spending shitloads of money. Now I can never go to my overpriced local hotel again. And I won’t waste my time asking to shoot Cantonese - The Movie in any other five star hotel either. They will all say no after three weeks. I know, my loss, not theirs, but I can’t be arsed.
So does anyone know of any other beautiful, upmarket venue that reeks of new money but doesn’t look like some EU bureaucracy headquarters on the outside, where we can film for 15 minutes without the risk of some self-important security guard coming up to us going: “LO KEM AH LA!!!” (No camera)
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