White Cloud

4- Don't Sweat It

"You have to fold the blanket over like this so that it all looks even," Sherry, the manager of housekeeping, is explaining to me. I really didn't think that it would be so hard to turn over a room and yet, she's shown me how to make a bed in three different rooms but I'm still working hard to get the hang of it. I really didn't think that it'd take so long to figure out how to make a bed. It's just that there's a perfect way to do it and if it's made any less than perfect, then it has to be redone.

Sherry is a really nice lady, so that's nice but she's also really strict, which is good because she needs to be strict so that everything turns out the right way and it's all up to the hotel's incredibly high standards. Vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms, the counters, dusting the TVs, refilling coffee filters and replacing coffee cups.

"Okay, do you think that you can handle the next one by yourself?" She asks me as she's finishing up the bed and looking around the room to make sure that everything is in tip top shape.

"I don't know but I'll give it a shot," I sigh as we're walking out of that room. I push the maid cart from the freshly cleaned room to the next room that needs turned over. Because she's training me, we're only cleaning the rooms that people have checked out of, not the daily rounds of the rooms that people are still staying in. That way, we're in no rush to finish.

"I'll let you do the bed by yourself while I get the kitchen and we'll see how you do," Sherry tells me with a small smile. The next room is down the hallway a little while so I follow her down to the suite that we're cleaning next. This one is a big room, one with a bedroom that's separate from the living area. It looks really, incredibly fancy and I take a small moment to look around the room but then I'm walking into the bedroom area to take off all of the old sheets and blankets to replace them with new sheets.

"Okay, I'm on it," I assure Sherry before walking confidently into the bedroom. I can do this on my own, it's no big deal. The first part is easy, all I have to do is pull everything off of the bed. The hard part comes when I have to dress it up again.

I start by removing all of the pillow cases and putting them onto the chair beside the bed and then I put the pillows on the floor by the bed because the pillows stay but pillow cases get washed. The blankets are thrown around on the bed, looking like somebody just slept here. I kneel on the soft mattress and start pulling on the sheets to get them off of the bed along with the blankets so that I can just get it all off in one motion.

However, as I'm pulling on the sheet, I put my other hand down in the blanket for support. That is a very bad mistake though because just as I put my hand down, I feel a cold smooth surface that doesn't feel like the blanket. It feels rubbery, like a balloon.

Looking down at what my hand is touching, I let out a shrill scream as I hop off of the bed. I know that it isn't rational but I swear I can feel my hand burning from all of the nastiness that I just touched.

"You sound like you just found your first condom," Sherry pipes, arriving in the doorway of the bedroom with a slightly amused look on her face. I'm sure that my facial expression is one of absolute terror. "Sweetheart, don't sweat it. Just wash your hands, I'll take care of it."

Still not really processing that I just touched a used condom, I just listen to Sherry and rush passed her into the separate bathroom to wash my hands. I use the complimentary bar of hand soap that she hadn't replaced yet in the bathroom and I scrub until my hand doesn't have that invisible burn anymore.

"So, what do you think?" Sherry calls to me as I'm practically running through the room to go back out to the cart that's left in the hallway because I know that there's a bottle of hand sanitizer out on that cart.