Tantelizing Tales From the Gorman Hotel

Lately I have been looking back on my short stint as a maid and would like to share a few of the highlights of my breif employment.

So I am home for Summer Break after my first year of college. My dad insists that I need to find a Summer job before I get back to school. So he drives me down a familiar road and we stop at the G. Hotel. He prods me out of the car to get an application.

I walk into the lobby of this tiny establishment and up to an 82 year old woman who is standing guard at the till. I mention my interest in working at her hotel and she tells me to follow her. We arrive in a small room crammed with washers, dryers, and my soon to be, least favorite appliance ever, "The Mangler". She starts folding bath towels and has me do the same. After ten minutes of folding, she wanders out of the room and leaves me there till arround ten at night. Keep in mind, I had never been so much as offered an application... I am guessing she counted that day of labor as training.

So my days at the hotel went on as such with only a few things that stuck me as odd...

1. Watering the Dirt: When I started, my mentor would give me small jobs to do, with one specification, you do them as fast a humanly possible. Any time or care added to any task was percieved as a lazy job and a waste of money. So here I am with a hose, watering the meagar plants that had attempted to grow and Mrs. G. walks up to me and tells me I am doing it all wrong.
She grabs the hose that I had set to spray, and turns it up to kill... She demonstrates the fine art of removing plants with a power washer and hands it back to me. So I finally understand.... I am not really watering the plants, I am on a mission to kill all the life forms on the ground and then get back to my more important job of watering the dirt.

2. Power-Washing the Windows: Same hose different job. Living in a costal town, the sea air is no ones friend, and the combination of the salt air solidifying on windows turns them a lovely opaque cream at best. So I was given the task of power washing the windows, which only exaserbated the situation and never accomplished anything other than annoying the guests. I think that this was all a secret plot to get the guests out of their rooms faster...
So off I go, power washing the windows at 6:30 in the morning... Watching the angry stares lining up at the windows one by one. Each with their sleepy gaze of disbelief that there is some terrible person, robbing them from their sleep with jets of water that echo inside their rooms.

3. Mopping the Parking Lot: There was a large rubber welcome mat in the main lobby of our hotel. It was used to help keep the mud down from the winter rains. Now being summer, it was just a large mat with no real purpose... But Margret decided it was filthy and it had to be cleaned. So she comes outside with a broom, a bottle of dish soap, and my favorite hose. After having me drag this 10 foot mat out into the parking lot she begins to show me the correct way to clean a giant wlecome mat. She hoses down the mat, covers it in dish soap and begins sweeping it is circles to srub it down. Two minutes go by and she hands the broom to me. She looks up in disgust and starts shouting that I am making too many bubble and that I have been using too much soap (the soap that I never had) and insists that I stay outside with my broom until every bubble is gone.