A national institution; they are everywhere. I no longer remember the exact figure – I could easily look it up – but last I knew they have three hundred (plus) points of sale nationwide alone. A monstrous cephalopod of its kind, the corporation has gobbled up other similar businesses over the last thirty years and nothing else competes with it… in its own dusty sort of way. They will feed you, cloth you, ensure you, send you off on holiday, etc, etc…they are a commercial cradle to the grave sort of affair and seek to cater for all your needs. Behind their apparent power and real extension they are still a family-run business and this becomes apparent when you deal with their employees – many of whom are nice enough and quite helpful – who smack of  semi off-hand gratitude to a life-long employer. Brands and suppliers of all kinds and colours fall over each other to gain favour with them for contracts of reduced margins at 180 days… “and you should be so lucky!” In a previous job one of my directors negotiated with them quite regularly and our rude inside joke was that annual purchases for the corporation, for a very broad line of products on a national scale, was based on what it was the family’s grandchildren happened to be playing with at that time. Perhaps…

I suppose it must have been sometime over the winter of 2004/2005 that I was here in Barcelona for a week’s holiday. Claudia was sharing Valen’s flat on Fontanella and I was camping at theirs for the duration of my stay. I was actively looking to move here to be with her and I had been spending my days dropping off CVs around town. At some point I ran out of the printed copies of my CV that I had brought with me and needed somewhere to print some more. Valen suggested I try El Castro Fiel just around the corner on Portal del Angel. I sauntered over with my last printed copy in hand and once at the door I asked one of the security men on duty where I might get my photocopies done. He directed me downstairs to the basement and left, past the section that dealt in stationary, where I would find colleagues of his that could help me. As I came down the escalator looking left I eyed a bench right at the back, manned by three young men in dark suits, behind bank after bank of office supplies of all sorts. No other customers were there. I meandered my way through the aisles and approached the taller one of the three attendants who seemed to me like he might be in charge. We exchanged greetings and I explained what it was I needed; thirty copies of this document and stapled on the top left hand corner please. He nodded his consent and turned around towards the photocopier that was behind him. I assumed that he would punch my instructions into the machine and that, everything having been automated, within a minute or two I would be handed back my warm thirty copies plus the original. Instead he proceded to copy my CV page for page, one copy at a time. As each copy emerged Helper One took them off the tray, made sure the pages were properly aligned and then held them out for Helper Two to staple carefully on the top left hand corner as I had requested. Everything was done with tremendous care and must have taken about 15 minutes. I was in no hurry.

Cristina and I were in one of their department stores yesterday to get various items of food we wanted. Although comparatively expensive, their supermarket is excellent on every level and especially good in terms of their range of products; for those more specific things you won’t generally find in some of the more run-of-the-mill supermarkets. So we picked up sauce this, pickle that, mustard the other, etc. Seeing as we were there, one of the things I wanted for the meal I had planned was some cucumber. I picked out a smallish one and weighed it. Rather than shove it in a plastic bag just for the sake of it, once the sticker emerged from the scales with it’s weight, price and barcode I just slapped it onto the cucumber itself and put it in our basket. On we went to the check-out counter and payed up. Once we had payed, Cristina wanted to pick up some coffee from the Nespresso people next to the deli section so over we went to them for a while. Whilst we were there, a good ten minutes later, the lovely girl from the check-out counter came over to us to ask if we might not be missing our cucumber. I looked in our bag and replied that perhaps we were after all. She said not to worry; she had left it for us at reception! I had to contain myself and my sense of the ridiculous as we then went to reception to say we were the couple concerning the missing cucumber. They were so polite and so nice about it and we all wished each other a happy new year as we parted company.