Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Butterflies And Terrible Jobs
Gaaaaaaaaaaah!
Seriously. I’ve been wanting to move from this place for awhile now and have been scouring ads and contacting agencies to help me find something better and early February I found something perfect! PER! FECT! Unfortunately, they did not wish to wait to rent it out till April when my lease was up so I had to lose it. So I’ve been looking more, with more desperation as each day passes and today I was shown something pretty damn decent.
It used to be this hideous mess of a building but they have completely renovated it and the grounds and the location is down right dreamy...only thing better would be right on the ocean, (some day, kids, some day) and I really want it. I am using the same rental agency since they have a chunk of change that was laid down last year and they can transfer that over to a new place but the problem is, the owners want about $200 more than I can comfortably afford. We are in the negotiating phase right now and we’ve already knocked off $100 and are trying to knock of at the least $50 more. That may not seem like a lot but it makes the difference between eating and not eating every month.
I will find out tomorrow. And I want to scream because I am not patient with some things in this world and waiting to see if I can get out of this dump is one of those things I have a hard time waiting on. IF I get the other place, I’ll tell you more about it but not right now. If I don’t get it, I may just fucking start sobbing because I want out of here in a bad way. Ironically enough, NOW they decide to fix the roof. This kind of crap is going to drive me insane. But, it doesn’t matter, I still want out of here. If they fixed the roof, fixed the washer and dryer AND fixed the damn windows and floors and put in a new tub and made all the leaks stop and evicted certain shooting type neighbors and noisy, disgusting twits who use this place as their personal landfill...it wouldn’t be bad at all. I’m still going to miss it though.
Moving on. A request has been made for me to write about one of the worst jobs I have ever held in my life. I think I wrote about it in some form or another back in my archives somewhere but I’m not inclined to search them to find it and I don’t think I ever went in to full detail. Maybe I did. If I did and you have read this before, well.....sometimes a good story is worth hearing again.
We all travel at some point in our lives and we have all and some will again, repeatedly, stay in a hotel. Every once in awhile someone will start talking about hotels and thinking about the people that were there before them and can gross themselves out. Their only defense is to block it out; not think about it while staying in the hotel. I’m here to tell you, some of the nastiest things you can imagine are reality.
During my college years, I took on a job as “housekeeping” in a high rated hotel chain. I didn’t necessarily want this particular job but I was a starving college student, (literally), and I needed something. This job was just blocks from my home which is one of the reasons I picked it. The first terrible thing about is the uniforms they made us wear. The women had to wear this unshapely smock of vomit pink with a square, white apron tied around them and white socks and white shoes, (which we had to buy ourselves). The guys wore the ugly vomit pink shirts, gray pants and dark shoes. I hated that uniform with a passion. We’re already doing this horrible job but that’s not enough, we also have to look like blobs of idiotic vomit walking down the hallways. Fabulous.
Anyway, they spent time training us how to clean and how to make a bed. You would think you know how to do this but they have a system and the bed making...I actually still use it to this day because I can make a bed in under a minute now, sheets tucked correctly, pillows fluffed and blanket and comforter in place. That was about the only good thing I got from this experience.
After training we were then hired on full time and we were given sheets each day of rooms to clean. Some of the rooms were still occupied and some of them were check out. I liked the check out rooms because the occupied rooms, sometimes? The people were sitting in the room when we would enter to clean it and I was embarrassed about my vomit pink smock and the fact that I was cleaning their dirty toilet.
We were required....REQUIRED to clean 17 rooms a day. Do you have any idea how fucking hard that is to accomplish? If we did not clean 17 rooms satisfactorily, our pay went down for the next month. Yes, we were graded on a constant basis and if we passed inspections, we kept our higher pay. If we missed too much, the next month our pay dropped. I understand why but I think they should have dropped at least two rooms and hired more people.
We would have meetings every morning and then we got our carts, cleaning equipment and rode the elevators to the floors we were to clean. Let me tell you something. You can quickly deteriorate into a total people hating person in one week of doing a job like this for the simple fact that far too many people in this world are total and complete disgusting pigs. How the hell some of these people could make such a fucking mess in just one or two nights of staying there I have not yet been able to fully understand.
The most common thing was the hairs in the bathroom. That was a biggie on our inspection checklist: Did we get all the pubes out of the bathroom? I can’t even begin to explain what it does to your self esteem to clean up other people’s pubes on a daily basis, 17 times a day. However, that is not even close to the most disgusting thing I ever witnessed.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. When we arrived to our floors, we would look for the rooms that were occupied first and get those done before the check out rooms. We would head to the first door, knock on it and say, “Housekeeping!” Wait. Knock again, “Housekeeping!” (I’m getting flashbacks and cringing already.) Normally there would be no answer so we would use the universal key to enter the rooms and position our carts so that the door never closed and begin.
The first thing we had to do was the bed. We removed the comforter, (if it wasn’t already on the floor or a chair), the blanket and then the sheets. For those of you wondering, why yes! Yes there were stains and abandoned, used condoms in them sometimes. What a glamorous job! We would roll up the dirty sheets, place them in the hamper portion of the bin, get out clean, fresh sheets and make the bed. However! What you don’t know...but you should, is that we didn’t always replace the blanket or comforter. We were instructed not to. The only time we would ever change one of those two is if “they really needed it.” Keep that in mind the next time you check in to a hotel room. You may wish to call down and ask for a fresh blanket and comforter.
After the bed was made we would then move to the dusting portion and cleaning/wiping down portion of the main room. Most of the time this wasn’t too bad but I would like to ask some of you if you ever think to clean your damn ears? Do you have any idea how many phone receivers I have picked up to clean to be met with some of the most disgusting ear wax I’ve ever seen in my life? Are these people jamming the phones inside their ear canals? Have they never heard of Q-tips? Maybe they should seek medical assistance for that problem.
After the main room was dusted and wiped clean, we took away the dirty or touched drinking glasses on top of the mini bar and the ice bucket. Another note: If the ice bucket still had the bag draped in it, unused, we were instructed not to waste time wiping it out. However, that doesn’t always mean that it’s clean. You may want to call down and ask for a clean one if you check in to a room.
We then moved on to the bathroom. Lord Almighty. First we removed all drinking glasses and used hotel shampoos and conditioners that were opened to replace them with new ones and picked up all the towels and wash cloths. Then we set about to wiping down the mirors, the sink counter and towel racks. From there we sprayed the shower and tub with a solution and while that soaked we cleaned the toilet. I ask, on behalf of all maids out there, would it be so much to ask that you all FLUSH after you use the toilet? Once the toilet was clean we would then clean the shower and wipe down light fixtures and switches. Then we would replenish supplies and bust out the vaccuum for all the floors. When that was done we would lay down clean bathmats in the bathroom, make a final sweep of the room and then grab our cart and move on to the next room.
This doesn’t sound too bad except that it’s not always that easy. You see, some people should be slapped. Some people have no manners or consideration for anyone else. I understand it’s a hotel room and that you paid for it but give me a break. That doesn’t mean act like a foul shit house monkey.
Some of the best rooms I ever cleaned were the ones the Japanese stayed in. This is not a stereotype, it is MY experience. Every single room that I cleaned that was occupied by a Japanese was easy, easy, easy, easy! I loved them as guests. They used ONLY what they needed to use, never made a mess and tipped us well. One time, I apparently impressed one guest so much with my very limited knowledge of his language, “Konichiwa! O genki desu ka” and did such a good job on his room that he tipped me $20 and gave me a really cool calender.
Unfortunately, most of the guests should be embarrassed with their lack of manners. The smelliest room I had to clean was a room occupied by two Russians. In all truth, they did spend the night previous drinking vodka and doing who knows what so that when I entered to clean it, I had to run out immediately because I thought I was going to puke. It smelled of sweat, alcohol and vomit. It permeated the room. It wasn’t too messy, really, no more than most, but the stench was gut lurching. I had to go get what we called an “O-Zone” machine, plug that in and let it run for hours while I cleaned other rooms. Even at the end of the day, when I went back to clean this room, the smell was still strong and I had to tie a towel around my face while cleaning to keep me from puking.
Many of the rooms were pretty messy, as I stated above as people apparently do not realize that the ice bucket is not a garbage can, no one apparently knows how to clean their hair out of a drain, people forget to flush, people have sex and leave the tell tale signs in the bed, people have nasty ear wax that they leave all over the phone receiver, people puke and leave it for the maid to clean up, etc.
The absolute worst room I had to clean, the room that made me crack, sit on the edge of the bed and sob, was a check out room on one of the higher floors. In this particular hotel chain, a higher floor meant more money was spent. This floor was so high that I could see my apartment building from the window of this room. I remember walking in to this room, positioning my cart, looking up and immediately feeling defeated. I could not believe that I had to clean this place. I didn’t even want to start so I walked over to the window to look out at the city, spotted my apartment, thought about my cats in there at that precise moment, thinking how lucky they were and realizing that I had to do this so that we could have a good life. We all have to pay our dues in this world and apparently it was my turn.
I turned around, sat on the edge of the bed, looked around at the horrific mess, sobbed for awhile then accepted my fate; it was my time to pay those aforementioned dues, stood up and got to work. Not only was there a condom and enormous stain in the middle of the bed, a stain with brown streaks in it, there was a condom on the floor and one on the bathroom floor. On the wall next to the bed was dried snot. Large, disgusting chunks of DRIED snot. You could tell that the person had been laying in bed, picked their nose repeatedly and wiped it all over the wall right next to the bed. The night table, with a BOX OF KLEENEX was within arms reach of the person laying in bed; if they could reach the wall to wipe their snot, they could reach the box of Kleenex, but they chose, instead, to be assholes and wipe it all over the wall. Have you ever cleaned dried snot? It doesn’t come off that easy. You have to scrub at it and the whole time you are scrubbing it, you are thinking about how this is someone else’s nasty fucking snot and pray to God that you don’t flick one of the pieces off the wall to have it come hurtling towards your face. In the ice bucket I found a used, bloody sanitary napkin. I opened the lid and there it was, staring up at me, mocking me. I tried to shake it out in to the trash but it was stuck. The adhesive was stuck to the sides of the ice bucket. It was the gold star of the day for me to be the lucky one who got to reach in there and fish it out with my hand. (Gloved at least.) The bathroom had puke in the toilet, which was easily flushed except the chunks that had stuck to the sides and seat. The sink had puke in it, clogged up the sink and I had to scoop the fucking puke out with my hand, again gloved but gloved or not, it doesn’t provide a barrier against the squishiness you feel after you break through the outside that had by that time crusted over. The pubes were all over the place. I had to run the vaccuum in there three times to get them all. Every single towel and washcloth had been used, some had blood on them, some had brown stains on them, (I can only assume these people didn’t feel inclined to use the TOILET PAPER), and every last one of them was soaking wet.
Needless to say, in that room I changed out everything I could change out. I was still one who cared about the next person who had to come in and use the room. I would warn you though, some maids take short cuts. I can’t speak for all hotel chains but I can speak for the one I worked in as I SAW maids take short cuts, they talked about it on their breaks and you, as the consumer, should be aware of this. You see, when a hotel requires and demands so much out of a person, pays them shitty wages to begin with and will knock their wages down for the next month if they don’t get all the rooms done, you, the consumer, are the one who gets the short end of the stick. You may not see it, but I’m sure it crawls on you at night while you’re sleeping. Or while you hum your way back from the ice dispenser with a full ice bucket. I heard stories from these maids about other maids in other even higher end hotels, as they apparently knew many of them or had held jobs at these other hotels so I’m confident in saying that it’s a widespread problem. I will not mention the hotel I worked in because I don’t have enough money to be sued; I won’t even tell you in an email so don’t ask. Just know that it happens.
And please, remember, tip the housekeepers. Just that little gesture alone could make the difference between you having a sparking, disinfected room or them reusing the sheets. (That’s not a joke.)
Thankfully I eventually pulled a muscle in my back while making a bed one day and after a trip to the doctor I was told I had to rest it for a period of a month. I then became a runner and that was a much better job, I got tipped way better, got more respect from the guests. I still had to wear that ugly vomit pink uniform though.
I eventually got fired. The reason I got fired was because I was what some may call a whistle blower. I was naive enough at the time that I didn’t realize management was in on the little scams of stealing tips and accepting gifts/bribes from some maids to keep their pay higher even though they didn’t pass. I still saw the world through rose colored glasses, even after all of that and my “candor” as it was called, got me fired. It wasn’t even worth fighting over it because I hated the job, it certainly wasn’t going to be my life long career and in that right to fire state, it just wasn’t worth the time and effort; not a battle I needed to head in to.
I got them in the end anyway. They fucked up. They wrote me a really long dismissal letter pointing out why they were firing me, but told the unemployment office it was because I had clocked in two minutes late one day. I had. I had forgotten to clock in before I got dressed. So they lost their battle, so to speak, against paying for my unemployment wages because I produced the letter to the unemployment office when the unemployment office first denied me any benefits. The unemployment office told me that they don’t pay for someone getting fired because they clocked in late, that I was out of luck. I told them, “That is not why they fired me.” They asked why, I told them, they asked if I had proof, I whipped out my letter, they contacted the hotel and next thing you know, I’m getting benefits until I found another job. And while I do NOT condone abusing benefits, I did sit on my ass for two weeks just enjoying the fact that I was getting paid for not cleaning nasty fucking rooms anymore.
Despite how horrible this job was, I learned that it can always be worse. I was sharing this story with my brother unit one time and I thought I had him topped with worst job ever held until he told me the time he had to clean the placenta out of the women’s bathroom when he worked at Disneyland after a park guest gave birth in there.
Now I hope you all find new respect for your jobs when you go in tomorrow. They aren’t so bad after all now are they?
