Making Beds is Hard Work

Making Beds is Hard Work 

I grew up on a farm where hard work and long hours are a given. But even this didn’t prepare me for my job as a chambermaid.  It had sounded so romantic, when a friend spent a summer working at a hotel out west. The job came with lodging, so it seemed like a great way for me to support myself for a while and escape the drudgery of the farm.

All that summer, I practiced. In addition to my usual chores stacking hay bales in the barn, picking stones from the fields and weeding the garden, I made all the beds in the house – even the ones we didn’t use.  Then I unmade the beds and made them again. My mother, who had some training as a nurse, taught me how to properly make “hospital bed corners,” although she wasn’t happy that clean sheets had been wasted in my practice chambermaiding.

By the time I was hired at the Banff Park Lodge, I thought I had the upper body strength, stamina and bed-making expertise to handle my new exotic new career.  I was mistaken.

The first challenge was the uniform. Who ever designed them had clearly never bent over to scrub a bathtub or make a bed.  They were all-in-one culottes that rode up the rear whenever you raised your arms or bent at the waist.  They were as ugly as they were useless – a dirty yellow colour, much like mustard after it had been vomited up.

My second challenge was to keep up with Lissy, who had been assigned to show me the ropes that first day.

I guessed Lissy to be in her mid twenties.  She was extremely athletic and quite pretty, despite having no facial hair and having drawn in her eyebrows with a brown pencil, rather too enthusiastically. “Enthusiastic” was the key word with Lissy.     

The hotel was divided in half with reception, restaurant and pool in the centre.  The T-shaped wings on each side were named after the nearby mountains, Cascade and Rundle. 

“Each of the rooms along the long hall has a king-sized bed,” Lissy said, drawing an imaginary stem of a T down the front of her torso, ending, lasciviously, at her groin.  “And, each of the rooms on the outside wings have queen-sized beds,” she continued, grinning and drawing her finger in a straight line across her breasts.

Each chamber maid was assigned to a clean a section of rooms, while the houseboys, wearing equally silly mustard vomit overalls, removed the soiled linen bags from our carts and kept up the supply of clean sheets. Trips up and down the elevators with the carts were to be kept to a minimum. 

Cleaning each room, regardless of whether the guests had checked out or were staying, required stripping and making the bed, dusting every surface, including behind and under the TV, sweeping the balcony, spraying every surface in the bathroom with industrial cleaner, wiping down every surface, including the bathtub regardless of whether it appeared to need it, and then vacuuming the entire room.  All of this while wearing buttocks-flossing culottes.

I was exhausted and well-chafed before we had completed even one room.  Lissy, however, took a break to run up and down three flights of stairs because she wanted to keep her heart rate up.

We were lucky, she informed me when all the rooms in our section were finally complete, that we didn’t encounter any monster messes or mishaps.  A room doesn’t need to be trashed to make it hard to clean – and I ran into a few trashed rooms in my time.  Sometimes a little thing can set you back a long way; Like the time the Amway convention booked an entire floor and every single room had jam smeared into the carpet; Or the time some jerk tried to pee off his balcony and missed.  Frozen pee is just as hard to remove as carpet jam, but more disgusting.

While we ran into no such trouble on that first day, Lissy informed me we were not done yet. It was up to each maid to return to each room in her section at the end of each shift.  The front desk was, apparently, incapable of keeping track of whether people checked in or out. It fell to us to physically enter each room at about 5 o’clock each day.

Again, and again, we walked in on people who, after a day on the slopes, were in the shower, just getting out of the shower, or in various states of undress or sexual intercourse.  Again, and again, we would knock and call “house keeping” while half naked, sweaty guests would assume that if they said nothing, we would go away.  

The vomitous culottes included a leather strap around the waist, from which hung a master key. Once, after knocking on a door and hearing nothing, I inserted the key, and turned it. At that exact moment a guy who had just stepped out of the shower saw the doorknob turning. He flung the door open, which propelled me into him, which dislodged his towel, under which he wore nothing. I was literally chained to the door and in the arms of a naked man. “Occupied,” I ticked off my checklist with as much dignity as I could muster.

A romantic new career? Hardly. I had escaped the farm, but was now immersed in drudgery of another kind, while wearing an instrument of torture and in the midst of eccentric people and unsettling situations. 

That was a long time ago. I have since stayed in many hotels and have a different perspective than most travellers. I have the following advice:  For the love of God, please call out if a hotel maid knocks on your door. And, never, never pee off the balcony.