My last little post makes the production of art sound frightening. And it is—but that’s what makes it so much more exciting than doing math, or cleaning toilets, scary though some are.
I know all about cleaning toilets. During my last semester of college I took a job as a housekeeper, where I worked with about seven other women cleaning rental cabins. I still had the job when I graduated in May, and I only recently quit. While I was there, I thought I could one day do housekeeping again, but now that I’ve been gone, I’m not so sure.
I felt comforted by completing repetitive tasks with only a few interruptions. My mind was free to roam wherever it wanted, and it did, regularly. I enjoyed the soothing lull of the washing machines, among which I would sit to perform the more mundane tasks of folding pool towels and sorting silverware. The laundry room was next to a golf course, but generally the work was very secluded. We didn’t experience many complaints as housekeepers, because the receptionists were the ones who had to deal with the customers in person. Even if I had to deal with the overflowing toilet, I got to plunge it in peace. Renters don’t usually like to stick around to watch the damage be undone, especially if they participated in it. One of the last cabins we cleaned before I left smelled strongly of skunk, but we’d heard no word of the aroma beforehand. For some reason, though, the guests had decided to check out—but were planning on coming back later, after maid service, to finish their stay.
Since the cabins were timeshares, the inconsistencies from one to another were pretty vast. Some did smell more musty and woodsy than others (but never quite like a skunk). Some of the beds were adorned with rustic quilts, some of them were patterned with Asian script. Some of the kitchens had more interesting architectural qualities than others. Some had dishwashers, some didn’t. We had a guest complain via written note that the icemaker in his fridge didn’t work, which became a running joke for weeks because the fridge in the cabin didn’t even have an icemaker. The empty bottles of heavy liquor left atop the fridge only served as extra fuel for our jokes.
Eventually gossip like this started bothering me, because while we sometimes gossiped about the guests, we gossiped about each other constantly. One of my favorite coworkers told me that a few of the other women said I was too slow cleaning the bathrooms, so I began to notice their eye-rolled reactions to my work. “Because I’m cleaning it RIGHT” became a secret retaliation I’d whisper to myself when it started, but I soon realized how stupid it was to even care. After I stopped caring about the comments, I stopped caring about the job, though, too. I rushed through the bathtubs and I didn’t leave extra soap if it meant another trip to get it. And nobody noticed or complained about that.
On my last day, a couple of the newer girls came up to me with a balloon they’d found in one of the cabins. Congrats! ran along the top. “Congratulations for being smarter than us and finding a better job!” one of the girls said, and it touched me in a strange way. I’d taken the housekeeping job because I like watching things transform. Stepping back to look at a newly refreshed room is pleasing to me, but it seemed like the rest of the women didn’t feel that way. They were doing housekeeping because it worked with their kids’ school schedules, or because they couldn’t find jobs doing other things. Some had bad records, some had bad attitudes, some had worked there for so long that they didn’t want to take the time to reapply somewhere else. They weren’t cleaning “for fun,” like I was, but the thing is, it’s a hard job. You’re dealing with what people leave behind in a place they don’t regard as theirs, and sometimes it’s like you’re cleaning up crime scenes. Once, before I started, there really was a crime scene to clean up. Nothing was bloodied, but appliances were broken and a man was arrested. Professionals of all kinds came in.
It’s even harder when places get rundown and stuff starts to stain and break, or when terrible guests ruin the hard-to-replace wood, linoleum, or upholstery. There is less pleasure to be found in cleaning when you can’t even make a difference. So much of work is like that. You do work to make a difference, and if the difference doesn’t make you happy, it makes for a terrible job.
Housekeepers get paid good money, though, which is the real reason I started doing it.
