Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Tales of a Hotel Maid Episode One: "How Clean is Your Room?"



Back in the day when I was in college I was a housekeeper at a hotel. It paid the bills, it was fun, and I got to work with my friends. Sure cleaning up after people isn't the most glamorous of jobs, in fact sometimes it was down right disgusting, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
How Clean is Your Room?



The Hotel I worked at was student run. We had adult supervisors there of course, but for the most part the people cleaning your rooms where in their early 20's, and if it happened to be a Saturday or Sunday morning more than likely they were hungover, or still drunk. Needless to say our actions as maids are NOT typical of housekeeping professionals around the world. We were young, immature, and just wanted a paycheck.
Now for a few of us, your room was indeed, clean. Really. I mean it. There were at least three of us who you could count on to make sure that your tub was spotless and the only hair that was on your sheets was clean. We called it "clean hair". No matter what, our sheets always came back from the cleaners with hair on them.
But how your rooms got clean, well that is the interesting thing. You see our hotel decided to save money and stop putting disposable coffee cups in the rooms, instead they just used the ceramic coffee cups. Sweet, better for the environment right? Well yeah sure. But unfortunately they were too cheap to buy enough mugs that we could always replace them with clean ones when they were used. Next time you are at hotel take a gander at the housekeepers cart. Does your room have coffee mugs? Is there dish soap on that cart? More mugs? Enough to fit the capacity of the hotel? If your answer was no to the everything but the first question, well I might be worried. Do you know what we cleaned our mugs with? Professional strength bathroom cleaner. That's right. Your coffee cup was cleaned with the same thing I used to clean your sink, toilet, and bathtub. Kind of shady right? Yes, and we continually got yelled at for doing it. I don't know what they expected us to do when there were NO clean mugs to replace them with. But we learned right away that bathroom cleaner was amazing. Not only did it work great on what it was made for it worked for other things too. Things like.....
Bed spreads-there is always that running joke that if you stay in a seedy motel you should sleep on top of the bedspread. Or strip it off. Or bring a sleeping bag and not get in the sheets at all. Well the hotel I worked at was rated 3 Stars. Not bad for a little ole hotel that isn't a big name. Still those bedspreads...yeah. We changed and washed them twice a year. Once in the summer and over Christmas. Sometimes if they had blood on them etc we would change them. For the most part though we would try and remove mystery spots with, you guessed it, professional strength bathroom cleaner, and it worked, a lot. Even those high priced suites you rented at our hotel had linens that only got changed twice a year. I'm not talking sheets folks, we changed those every time we cleaned the room as a check out. I'm talking blanket, and top bedspread.

What is it about PUBES in the bathtubs at hotels? Seriously people this is a serious question. I live at my house, I have a bathtub and it stays pubic hair free. For some strange reason the bathtubs at our hotel were literally covered in pubes. Literally. Covered. In. Pubes.
Look at me I'm doing the pube dance, throwing my pubes everywhere!!
This is literally the only rational conclusion that I could come too. People had pube parties in the bathtubs. I imagine them in my head just ripping out gobs of pubic hair and throwing them in the air with evil glee! Muhahaha. I'm going to make that housekeeper feel like they are covered in my private hairs. Bahahaha.
During football weekends sometimes you would find other enjoyable things in the shower, like diarrhea. But that's another Maid Tale for another day.
Peace out!

7 comments:

  1. EWWWWW! And this is the "tame" one??? lol

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  2. ok, so yeah...I should've listened to Lindsay to NOT ask you to tell me the story....now, my mind is scarred FORVER!!!

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  3. Bahahaha. I can't wait for the next story! And the comforters I knew about...but seriously the blanket too?!?! God now I have to strip the blanket off my bed along with the comforter.

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  4. Ok Lori guess I am going to have to challenge you like my kid did me about nursing. What is the grossest thing you have seen in a hotel room. That had some gross stuff but I know you have better or worse, depending on how you look at it. lol

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    1. I'd tell you now, but that would ruin the other posts. ;-)

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  5. Wow. They wouldn’t even spring for kitchen cleaning materials? Did they thinking rinsing it in water was enough? Admittedly, I sometimes use a bathroom cleaner to remove a stain but then again, I wash it with actual laundry soap afterwards. It’s kinda stupid that they scold you for using such methods, but they won’t buy proper supplies.

    >> Tyler

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    1. At one point in time they had those dish wand things that carried soap in them, but then they caught people using them to use the toilets and took them away! That was before my time there. In theory I think they thought they had enough mugs, and bedspreads to cover the whole hotel, but for some reason we could never find them.

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