How To Be a Tour Guide
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Being a tour guide is a pretty horrendous business. I did it for three summers in a pottery in Devon, and it is not something you would do unless you were financially desperate.
This may sound extreme, but look at the facts:
* tour guides are considered by all other employees at your place
of work to be a lower form of life. They are routinely ignored,
spat at and derided.
* tour guides say the same things many hundreds of times to the
same bored-looking people
* it is a tour guide's fault if anything at all goes wrong during
a tour - a child falls over, it begins to rain, someone receives
a parking fine. Anything.
However, if you are in the situation of being obliged to work in the field (and yes, there probably are worse jobs), then here are the Top Five Tips to get by:
1) Tour Guides Must Know Everything. From Day One you must attempt to
learn everything from the maximum temperature of a gas-fired kiln to the average number of pots produced by two men working flexible shifts in four calendar months. (Of course, this particular information will be of no use if you are working in a stately home.)
2) Tour Guides Must Make Things Up If They Don't Know Something. Sounds dishonest, but face it: the last thing you want if your little girl asks a bizarre question is for the spotty-faced guide to say "Er, I dunno." An example:
SMALL BOY: 'Scuse me - how many tons of clay have been dug
up since the beginning of time?
TOUR GUIDE (pretending to do complicated calculations): Well,
we can't be sure but we think it's something like
4.5 thousand million metric tons.
SMALL BOY: Really?!
TOUR GUIDE: Oh yes. Quite definitely, as a matter of fact.
3) Tour Guides Must Speak More Loudly Than They Would Believe Humanly Possible. This is not to prevent people asking you to speak up. The problem is, they won't. A dozen senior citizens will prefer to wait right until the end of the tour, just before you are due to have a lunch break, and then ask you to repeat to them, individually if possible, every word you've said in the last half hour. Bang go your sandwiches.
4) Tour Guides Are Not Stand-Up Comedians, Variety Performers or Classically-Trained Actors. Your astonishing theatrics will, more likely than not, simply not be entertaining; your gag-cracking at the expense of 19th-century clay merchants at a crucial point in the tour
will be met with silence. Just speak up and sound interesting, for pity's sake.
5) Tour Guides Must Immediately Work Out the Nationality of Their
Visitors. If they speak your own language, that's dandy. Unfortunately, you will find visitors from another country to be somewhere on a sliding scale from fluency to total incomprehension.
Speak very slowly, unless they look at you with 'How dare you patronise me?' eyes. And whatever you do, don't attempt to speak in THEIR language; that just adds insult to injury.
Happy holidays!
This may sound extreme, but look at the facts:
* tour guides are considered by all other employees at your place
of work to be a lower form of life. They are routinely ignored,
spat at and derided.
* tour guides say the same things many hundreds of times to the
same bored-looking people
* it is a tour guide's fault if anything at all goes wrong during
a tour - a child falls over, it begins to rain, someone receives
a parking fine. Anything.
However, if you are in the situation of being obliged to work in the field (and yes, there probably are worse jobs), then here are the Top Five Tips to get by:
1) Tour Guides Must Know Everything. From Day One you must attempt to
learn everything from the maximum temperature of a gas-fired kiln to the average number of pots produced by two men working flexible shifts in four calendar months. (Of course, this particular information will be of no use if you are working in a stately home.)
2) Tour Guides Must Make Things Up If They Don't Know Something. Sounds dishonest, but face it: the last thing you want if your little girl asks a bizarre question is for the spotty-faced guide to say "Er, I dunno." An example:
SMALL BOY: 'Scuse me - how many tons of clay have been dug
up since the beginning of time?
TOUR GUIDE (pretending to do complicated calculations): Well,
we can't be sure but we think it's something like
4.5 thousand million metric tons.
SMALL BOY: Really?!
TOUR GUIDE: Oh yes. Quite definitely, as a matter of fact.
3) Tour Guides Must Speak More Loudly Than They Would Believe Humanly Possible. This is not to prevent people asking you to speak up. The problem is, they won't. A dozen senior citizens will prefer to wait right until the end of the tour, just before you are due to have a lunch break, and then ask you to repeat to them, individually if possible, every word you've said in the last half hour. Bang go your sandwiches.
4) Tour Guides Are Not Stand-Up Comedians, Variety Performers or Classically-Trained Actors. Your astonishing theatrics will, more likely than not, simply not be entertaining; your gag-cracking at the expense of 19th-century clay merchants at a crucial point in the tour
will be met with silence. Just speak up and sound interesting, for pity's sake.
5) Tour Guides Must Immediately Work Out the Nationality of Their
Visitors. If they speak your own language, that's dandy. Unfortunately, you will find visitors from another country to be somewhere on a sliding scale from fluency to total incomprehension.
Speak very slowly, unless they look at you with 'How dare you patronise me?' eyes. And whatever you do, don't attempt to speak in THEIR language; that just adds insult to injury.
Happy holidays!
