Monday, July 9, 2018

As hotel housekeeping, what was the worst room you’ve had to clean?

I wasn't the housekeeper in either of these cases, but each is an example of why I'm grateful that those housekeepers are there, so I don't have to go in and clean up a mess like this.

An owner up in Connecticut took in a homeless guy and gave him a room and a hundred bucks or so a week in exchange for doing a lot of the maintenance around the place. About three months later when he began backsliding into his uncontrolled alcohol and substance abuse and it came time to vacate him out of there, the entire floor of the room in which he'd been living — with two cats, no less — was ankle-deep in garbage and cat poop. (The urine merely soaked into the carpet, which had to be replaced along with the mattresses and all soft goods.)

Related image

And then there were the two old guys who checked into a double room at a low end hotel here in Winston-Salem early on a Friday afternoon with several bottles of booze, paid in advance for three nights, and settled in on a hard, weekend-long drinking binge. Whenever either of them had too much and had to throw up, they just leaned over and puked right there on the floor between the two queen beds. Repeatedly. All through the weekend. After they left without checking out Monday morning, the housekeepers found a pile of accumulated vomit in that spot. The maintenance guys flipped for it to decide which one of them would be stuck with the job of heading down there with a flathead shovel to shovel it out. That room also got new carpet.

If you run a hotel, always treat your housekeepers with kindness and respect, and occasionally show a little gratitude and do a little extra for them. It's a dirty, nasty, not very well-compensated job, but they're what keeps you from having to put on an apron, roll out a cart, and go up there and do it.

Originally appeared on Quora

No comments:

Post a Comment