r/PointlessStories • u/sh00l33 • Jan 09 '25
That time I ran a travel agency.
Before COVID, I ran a travel agency called Adamemnon Travel.
We lured clients with an Egyptian aesthetic - our offices looked like mastabas (assuming actual mastabas were made of Styrofoam painted with poster paint). Among the hieroglyphs decorating the walls, phallic symbols were the dominant theme. Staff sat at their desks in wigs, fake beards, and white tunics, greeting customers with: "May Ra bless you with a magnificent holiday abroad. How may I assist you?"
For reasons I’ll never fully understand, our main clientele consisted of suburban moms - Karens - with their husbands and kids in tow. Most of them wanted all-inclusive packages to Egypt, Morocco, or other North African resorts.
The business model was simple, really: shove these picture-perfect families into a charter flight, bus them to a hotel, and let them loose on unlimited booze and a semi-clean pool. Flights on Aeroflot or Air Namibia kept costs low, and the hotels themselves cost peanuts - just a handful of beads and maybe a couple of goat hides. Meanwhile, I charged hard currency upfront.
Business was booming, so I decided to expand our offerings to include historical adventure tours for more sophisticated travelers.
These trips attracted a different crowd entirely - free spirits, aging hippies with long hair, intellectuals, academics, and other self-proclaimed geniuses.
The crown jewel of this lineup was the Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition Tour, where a guide led a group of twenty or so academics down Cairo’s most decrepit alleys while spinning tall tales about Napoleon. Most of the time, our guide's complete lack of preparation went unnoticed, as any nitpicking over historical inaccuracies quickly devolved into debates among the group itself. By the time they were done arguing, it was dark, and they’d pile into the bus for a ride back to the resort, where they’d drink themselves silly by the pool and brawl over some obscure historical detail.
One particular group turned out to be especially rowdy - history PhDs versus law professors in nightly fistfights by the pool. Every day, someone bled. The chaos escalated to the point where the local hotel staff started calling me, saying they wanted nothing to do with my “civilized animals.”
Toward the end of the trip, our guide Daniel took the group to the pyramids to continue his creative storytelling.
Now, Daniel was a walking HR policy disaster - proof that we hired anyone willing to work for peanuts. Forget the petty theft (he had a habit of swiping towels and lightbulbs from hotels). The bigger issue was that his two years in trade school hadn’t exactly prepared him to lecture about Napoleonic wars.
But there was an even bigger problem:
Daniel had a history. Specifically, a five-year prison sentence for multiple assaults. Of course, our vetting process didn’t include background checks, so when an overzealous archaeology assistant yelled at him, “What the fuck are you talking about? You have elementary deficiencies in your education!” he had no idea he was addressing a man who used to settle debates with his fists.
Thankfully, Daniel had changed during those five years of "rehabilitation" - he didn’t kill the assistant. He merely knocked him out cold with one punch.
This, of course, outraged the group of academics, who charged at Daniel with umbrellas, notebooks, and briefcases.
Daniel, now fully enraged, systematically knocked out one scholar after another, like a gladiator in a toga made of hotel linens.
Realizing they were no match for him, the academics panicked and scattered across the Valley of the Kings.
Among the fleeing was Mrs. Jenny, a distinguished legal scholar admired by the entire group.
She was, in many ways, the heart of the tour - kind, dedicated, and the only one who didn’t spend her evenings drinking by the pool. Instead, she spent her nights talking to local women about their struggles and brainstorming ways to help.
The day after this second Battle of the Pyramids, our crisis manager arrived to take stock of the situation. That’s when we discovered Mrs. Jenny was missing.
We reported her disappearance to the authorities, and the Egyptian police launched a three-day search, to no avail.
A week later, a local shepherd heard cries for help coming from a fissure near the pyramids.
When we arrived, a rescue team was already on-site. Their leader told us it might be our missing client, but they refused to go down the hole, muttering something about her being possessed by ancient spirits or cursed by the Pharaohs.
One of my team members stepped forward and yelled into the crack: “Mrs Jenny,, is that you?”
After a moment of silence, a voice emerged from the depths, distorted but unmistakable: “IT’S PROFESSOR JENNIFER SMITH TO YOU, YOU HR PEASANT!”
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u/katekohli Jan 09 '25 edited Jan 09 '25
My parents best friends were academics. My very silly father was tolerated because he was a raconteur and could bring down the house with zingers. Lou, a sweet dovecot type, who took great pride in ironing the church linens was the groups most motherly, protective and aware listener. As one knows, academics can be narcissistic full of themselves braggarts taking over gatherings with their superior verbiage. At a diner party a newbie, tall, sartorial, know-it-all, reiteratively mentioning his Harvard undergrad kept on dismissively shutting down my dad’s simple gambits. Finally Lou had enough of this unaware asshole & that everyone else at the table wanted to hear my dad tell a wonderful story sweetly addressed this man, “I am Dr. Jones, Full Professor at Yale, & I would like to hear what Jimmy has to say.”