Unacceptable!

Lunch was finished, and the conference on Financing of Vocational Education and Training I was attending at CEDEFOP, the European Centre for Development of Vocational Training, was over. I managed to complete the conference without putting my foot in my mouth (or at least not too many times) and I had half an hour before the bus was due to depart for the hotel. So I decided to go back into the main conference room at CEDEFOP’s Thessaloniki headquarters, which was now deserted, and catch up on email.

This created a certain administrative furor. The two worthy ladies cleaning the room stopped in momentary paralysis, uncertain of how to continue. It was only after reassuring one of the conference organisers that yes, of course they could continue cleaning, and no, they weren’t bothering me, that I was allowed to finally get on with my email.

The uneasy silence which had settled did not last long. A steady murmuring started, punctuated by sibilant bursts of outrage. The two ladies were circling around the conference tables, thrashing at them with cleaning rags with barely contained rage.

I gradually understood, from their conversation, that one of their administrators, a Bulgarian, had the unsurpassed arrogance to somehow criticize their work just a while ago.

“Unacceptable,” demanded one of them. “What happened today was UNACCEPTABLE.” Her capable hands smashed the table as though it was the Bulgarian’s face she was pummelling.

“Something is going on,” the other one insisted. “You can see this, something is going on!”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the first one replied. “In all the years I’ve worked here, noone has ever said anything to me!”

I tried to tune out their indignation. I had been out until 01:00 last night at the conference dinner, discussing vocational education and training and trying to avoid a faux pas while straining to hear the dinner conversation. It’s quite demanding: the dinner started with a discussion of the complicated Belgian parliamentary system and a comparative review of European tax and social security contributions, and then moved on to even more esoteric issues. By the end of it, I realised that I could barely keep my eyelids propped open, and that I should really wake up early to slap together a presentation on the committee discussion I had participated in.

And this is where I suffered my latest existentialist shock. Leaving the restaurant in the Ladadika, I walked out in the rainy, promise-filled evening of Thessaloniki and discovered…that the streets were FULL of beautiful young people. They were streaming in all directions, in their mini-skirts and their trench coats and jeans and Armani/Zara clubwear, laughing, talking, smoking, making that cheerful din of the young.

For a moment, I wondered if perhaps a demonstration was about to start. But then it hit me: they were all going out! Every fashionable bar along the waterfront, between the port and my hotel, the Makedonia Palace, was packed. Packed! Full to capacity, people out on the pavement, smoking, writhing absently to music, talking, smoking.

I realised then that I’ve really fallen off life’s bandwagon. Here I am worrying about my presentation and how to finance VET systems and the projects I have to deal with next week, and all around me thousands of beautiful young people are talking the night away, clearly not worried about working or studying or doing anything else the next morning. Most of them were still arriving for the evening’s entertainment. Am I really this old?

“UNACCEPTABLE!” My thoughts were brought back to the conference room with a shock. “WHAT SHE SAID – UNACCEPTABLE!” The anger of the cleaning ladies had bubbled over. A crisis point was reached.

For a brief, hysterical moment, I thought of singing out that hideous old Karras song: Ασ’την να λέει, άσ’την να λέει, εκείνη μόνο ξέρει, και μέσα της θα κλαίει, άσ’την να λέει.... (I won’t bother translating it…it's hopeless).

In my imagination, Karras himself would rise in a white sequined suit from the front of the conference room, crowds of nubile VET students would shimmy to the beat, and the two cleaning ladies would be vindicated in a sweeping Bollywood moment, dancing through the marble halls of CEDEFOP.

But as with the evening before, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Better to keep my head down, answer my emails, and avoid the wrath of the cleaning ladies—or perhaps the Bulgarian. Tace is Latin for candle. They made their pinched, offended way out of the conference room, intent on the battle. And I went back to my emails.