{"id":6917,"date":"2010-03-05T11:32:23","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T09:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whalecottage.com\/blog\/?p=6917"},"modified":"2010-11-28T15:17:20","modified_gmt":"2010-11-28T13:17:20","slug":"hermanus-office-national-sweet-and-the-fugard-sour-service-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chrisvonulmenstein.com\/blog\/cape-town\/hermanus-office-national-sweet-and-the-fugard-sour-service-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"Hermanus Office National Sweet and The Fugard Sour Service Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Sweet Service Award <\/strong>goes to Hermanus Office National, a stationery shop that sells a large range of stationery items in a smallish shop opposite SupaQuick in Hermanus, at the most unbelievably low prices.\u00a0 Printer and fax cartridges are generally expensive when bought at Incredible Connection.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0A typical M40 cartridge for a Samsung fax machine costs R394 at Hermanus Office National, compared to R 401\u00a0at Walton’s and an incredible R\u00a0499,95 at Incredible Connection!\u00a0The goods in the shop are neatly displayed, given its small space, and the owner’s son was very efficient in taking payment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Sour Service Award <\/strong>goes to The Fugard theatre, which opened a mere\u00a03 weeks ago.\u00a0\u00a0The booking service was friendly and trusting (telephonic booking of tickets without requesting credit card details), the ticket collection process was efficient, and the ticket price was cheap at R 50.\u00a0 The entrance to the theatre is via an adjoining ex-church, beautifully restored and lit, a lovely space in which to meet other theatre-goers, with a large bar, at which one can pre-order and pre-pay one’s drinks for interval, a novel idea.\u00a0\u00a0 Everything was fine up to this point.\u00a0 An irritation relative to other Cape Town theatres is that seating is on a\u00a0first-come first-served basis, like at The Labia, rather antiquated, so one had to go up to the third floor to get a seat, far from the stage, and had to sit on long benches as opposed to individual seats. No one was prepared to shift up to make space for others – meaning a shortage of seating due to gaps in between.\u00a0 On the way to the seating, four different members of staff asked patrons to switch off their cellphones.\u00a0 The patron was attacked when she was checking her last Twitter message, the phone\u00a0having been set on\u00a0silent – the hostess threatened to remove the phone.\u00a0\u00a0 The hostess was standing on the staircase on the aisle, next to the patrons, and kept marching up and down the aisle, berating patrons for even daring to touch their phones to check messages.\u00a0 One couple arrived late (the theatre shows strangely start at 19h30) and was let in, and shown their seats with a torch, annoying all patrons on the aisle.\u00a0\u00a0 A patron wanted to go the cloakroom before interval, and was refused permission to leave by the hostess.\u00a0 The hostess made a huge disturbance while trying to explain why she would not let the patron out.\u00a0\u00a0 The sneakers worn by the staff make\u00a0a squeaky noise when they walk along the aisles.\u00a0\u00a0 At interval the patron went to find the Manager Johan Kupserburger, and only managed to get half the complaint about the disturbances to him, before being rudely cut off by him, as he had just spotted Mangusotho Buthelezi in the audience.\u00a0\u00a0 At interval two\u00a0patrons almost came to blows, as the more assertive patrons were served first by the three bar staff trying to serve about 250 patrons, ahead of those that had stood there for longer.\u00a0 After interval two hostesses were put on duty where the\u00a0theatre-goer was sitting, apparently as a fire regulation (the 70-page Western Cape ‘By-Law for Community Fire Safety’ does not mention\u00a0such a requirement\u00a0at all) for the building.\u00a0\u00a0 The new hostess walked up and down too, talked to her colleague right next to the patrons during the show, and kept moving – standing up and sitting down on the steps.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Feedback presented to the Manager at the end of the show was greeted with disbelief, implying that the patron was not telling the truth!\u00a0 He did admit that the staff had only been working at the Theatre for 2 weeks.\u00a0 He then wanted to force the patron to speak to the Director, instead of asking the Director to come to the patron in a\u00a0quiet corner.\u00a0 The Theatre has the most terrible karma and the staff are fanatical about reacting to cellphones, not understanding that reading\u00a0or texting a message, or Twittering, does not affect the volume of the phone.\u00a0\u00a0 Ironically,\u00a0a bottle and plastic cups fell over during the show, for all to hear.\u00a0\u00a0 The end result\u00a0was a horrid evening, with little enjoyment of\u00a0what was a most unusual production of the Mozart opera ‘The Magic Flute’ a la township-style, with marimbas only\u00a0in place of a full\u00a0orchestra.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 28\/11<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0 The owner of the Fugard Theatre Eric Abraham,\u00a0London-based South African, had the Isango Portobello theatre company expelled from the premises last week, reports the Cape Argus<\/strong>.\u00a0 Financial and creative issues between Abraham and Isango Portobello’s\u00a0Mark Dornford-May may have been the cause. The next performance at The Fugard will be in January,\u00a0an Athol\u00a0Fugard play translated into Afrikaans ‘Die Kaptein se Tier’.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards<\/strong>\u00a0are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog.\u00a0 Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at <\/span>info@whalecottage.com<\/span><\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales <\/span><\/strong>newsletters on the <\/span>www.whalecottage.com<\/span><\/a> website.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sweet Service Award goes to Hermanus Office National, a stationery shop that sells a large range of stationery items in a smallish shop opposite SupaQuick in Hermanus, at the most unbelievably low prices.\u00a0 Printer and fax cartridges are generally expensive when bought at Incredible Connection.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0A typical M40 cartridge for a Samsung fax machine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[3,124,75,248,21],"tags":[3741,8878,1154,32378,8880,3575,8879,32377,3732,3737,3739,3738,3740,3583,8877,3742,3733,3735,3731,3734,3743,776,2286,3736,32373,2354],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t