ARTICLE: Confessions of a Hotel Housekeeper

The title of this article alone gave me the heebie jeebies, so naturally I'm going to share it with the rest of you!

I cut corners everywhere I could. Instead of vacuuming, I found that just picking up the larger crumbs from the carpet would do. Rather than scrub the tub with hot water, sometimes it was just a spray-and-wipe kind of day. After several weeks on the job, I discovered that the staff leader who inspected the rooms couldn't tell the difference between a clean sink and one that was simply dry, so I would often just run a rag over the wet spots. But I never skipped changing the sheets. I wouldn't sink that low, no matter how lazy I was feeling.

...

I was disgusted by the many guests I came in contact with through the things they left behind: the hairs on the pillow, the urine on the toilet seat, the half-eaten cookie, the stained sheets. One woman had soiled her sheets so thoroughly that we had to toss them in a biohazard bag—they could never be used again. Rooms where young kids stayed were the worst, with food ground into the carpet and piles of used diapers in the trash. That kind of demoralizing mess could take 45 minutes to clean up. Most maids wore rubber gloves when they worked, but mine were too big, so I discarded them. Unsurprisingly, I got the flu twice.

When you travel as much as we do, a clean, decent hotel room is high on the priority list. I remember one particular trip to Baltimore there was a mix-up at the [REDACTED] hotel. Due to a Red Sox game (we love Baltimore, but there are few things more depressing than the meager turnouts for Orioles games. Only when a "good" team comes to town would there be anything approaching a half-full Camden Yards) all the rooms were booked.

And because we got in so late due to flight delays, the hotel had torn up our reservations in favor of early-bird New Englanders. Unfortunately for us, the entire city was booked solid--we couldn't rent a utility closet if we had $1,500 and an infectious smile. Anyhow, the only place the [REDACTED] hotel could put us up was across town in an incredibly shady area. Having no choice, we drove over and were faced with our worst nightmare.

We're talking long hairs on the shower walls, the stench of cigarettes complimenting (an impressive number of) cigarette burn holes in the comforter, a lumpy, saggy mattress, stained, damp carpet, running toilet, police sirens all night--take my word for it, all it was missing was a chalk outline next to the air conditioner. Needless to say, none of us slept well that night.

The [REDACTED] hotel did the right thing and gave each of the three of us a heaping of hotel points for our troubles, but I'll never forget that particular experience.

And just in case you weren't properly nauseated, I want you to think about the one thing in a hotel room that probably gets the most use: the TV remote control. Consider the sheer number of filthy mitts that have come into contact with that remote before your arrival, and the incredible amount of bacteria and who-knows-what-else clinging to that thing.

Now, within the context of the above article, think about how often the housekeepers hit that thing with a little Formula 409.