Now THAT’S Making A Clean Getaway

I’ve been a housekeeper at various hotels for many years. I don’t have children, but anyone who has ever been a child, met a child, or had to clean up after a child knows that their messes can get pretty destructive. I can instantly tell when a child has been in any hotel room I’ve had to clean — fruit gummies, cracker pieces, snack crumbs, and questionable sticky smears all over the floors and usually every other surface, etc.

One day, I’m at work and I have a lot of rooms to do, and they are pretty bad today. A hockey team has just come through and booked most of the hotel, and the hockey crowd is usually pretty messy. 

I’m in one of the rooms cleaning up the ungodly mess when I see a little boy, maybe eight years old, exit the room across the hall from the room I’m in. He just stands there all bundled up for the winter, presumably waiting for his parents to follow him out of the room. Pretty soon, the room door opens, and out follow his parents along with two younger siblings:  another boy about six years old and a little girl who is around three or four.

They leave with their luggage — which housekeepers always keep an eye on because when waiting for rooms to free up for cleaning, there’s not a moment to lose — so I pop my head out and check the room number they’ve left from. I reference my list of rooms to see if it’s assigned to me or a different housekeeper. It’s my room. 

I groan internally, anticipating the enormous mess I’ll have to deal with from three young children once I get into that room. I finish the room I’m currently working on, close the door, and take a deep breath before letting myself into the next room — the one I know will be trashed by the three young children.

I open the door, bracing myself for a bloodbath of piles of trash, scattered food, sticky messes, and other forms of chaos children on vacation leave in their wake. To my absolute shock, the room is one of the tidiest and cleanest I have ever stepped foot in, in all my years of housekeeping.

There is zero trash anywhere other than a few discarded items in the provided trash bins, surfaces are crystal clean, there are zero floor crumbs, and there is not one gummy candy, fish cracker, or juice box to be found. They even tidied both beds to where they almost looked freshly made. They used only a couple of towels and stacked them neatly next to the bathroom door. (Most families use every single provided towel and washcloth and leave them in a giant sopping wet pile inside the bathtub, which is a nightmare to pick up, because it’s extremely heavy, not to mention kind of gross.)

I’m flabbergasted, to say the least. It takes me record time to thoroughly clean and sanitize the room for the next guest(s), and I’m very grateful to the family for being so conscientious and for the immaculate state they left their room. If I hadn’t seen the family with three young children in tow physically leaving the room with my own eyes, no amount of convincing would have gotten me to believe that there had been anyone in that room other than one single neat-freak adult.

Thank you, random family, for making my otherwise rough day that much easier. You rock.