share a little time

So, Jeff Davies is showing me pictures of his family.
Lovely wife, daughter aged 20, son coming up 17, and there may have been a dog. We have never met.
All snapped smiling on the front drive of their pretty house in Central Orlando.
It has lost half its value in the past 12 months, but Jeff is obliged to show me all of this.
Obliged because his manager at West Lake Resort has determined that family is a great sales tool, and as a front line salesman he is expected to exploit his own.
We have never met, but he is showing me these pictures and giving me the back story, what his children are studying and what they aspire to be.
And Jeff tells me that he used to be a chiropractor, but time-share apparently pays better and the hours are not so long.
We have never met, and will never meet again. We do not want to own a 2 or 3 bedroomed condominium in this lakeside development, for one week a year. Or indeed every other year. We do not want to own it, or pay just $300 extra to swap it for a similar property in any of the other major tourist resorts where West Lake’s partners have identical condo.
While paying spiralling maintenance charges to keep the lawns of all these time-share properties immaculately manicured, without a blade out of place.
We do not want this. We do want tickets for the Florida theme parks at a fraction of the cost if you were to buy from any one of the hundreds of kiosks hustling a deal.
That is the sole reason for being one of the few white families in a throng of Afro American folks contemplating this tiny slice of the American dream.
We do not want the peanut butter cookies fresh out of the oven in the ‘show condo’.
They are safe in the oven gloved hands of a lady from Honduras, and are the new ‘making bread’ or ‘brewing coffee’. They smell like home. Just not our home.
But Jeff can’t let us go just yet. We have to meet his manager, a charming lady from Peru. We swap memories of the great Teofilio Cubillas, who was the real slayer of Scottish dreams at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
We were told she came to the United States, and started out cleaning peoples’ homes.
Now she sells extra part time accommodation to those who feel such a thing is necessary.
After all, for those 51 weeks of the year you are not there, rest assured your cash is keeping the place in the style to which you are barely accustomed.
Her children are keen football fans, having gone to Germany in 2006 and booked up for South Arica next year. Sadly Peru have been as absent from the tournament for as long as the unfortunate Scots.
Equally unfortunately was the fact that we did not want anything else she was selling.
We left with what we wanted, passes for the parks, the ultimate time-share experience for those with a bellyful of reality.
Jeff joked our intransigence ensured that he could hit the golf course early. Where he could daydream about still being called doctor and making the nasty back pain go away. But clearly he didn’t want that, oh no.
Next, the wonderful world of fast lines and synthetic Mardi Gras, complete with an exotic man from Panama and his partner John.
Hasta la vista, as they say down that way.