Last summer, I worked as a maid. For one day. Actually, full disclosure, I didn't even earn full-fledged maid status. I shadowed a maid for a day, and she happened to be my sister.
My sisters Clare and Becca, a sophomore and a freshman in college, respectively, have spent the past two summers working as maids in a ramshackle beachfront motel. My mother, ostensibly tired of stepping over piles of Us Weekly, crumpled wet beach towels and empty dishes, told my two sisters they had to get up and get employed, or else.
Finding maid-dom their only option in the small Maine town where we spend the summers, the pair thought it would be fun. They could gossip all day. They could wear Soffes instead of suits. Besides, Kate Bosworth was totally a resort maid in Blue Crush-and she ended up snagging a hot NFL quarterback in town for the Pro Bowl. OMG.
Anyway, the glamour factor lasted about two days, after which it became apparent that Tom Brady was never going to waltz into Smuggler's Cove Oceanfront Inn. It sank in: The two were just a pair of old maids, squealing over hair-covered soap and mopping up vomit.
But they kept at it. By the time I joined my family in Maine after my own summer job ended, I was ready to relax and play. My chief playmates, however, were waking up at dawn to change waste basket liners and coming home exhausted. This was no fun.
So I volunteered to come with them one day, just to see.
Pan to me standing behind Clare, my arms full of purportedly clean towels.
Knock, knock.
"Housekeeping!" Clare said.
The door opened to a man in Hawaiian print shorts and his wife, sitting in a terry cloth robe smoking a cigarette.
"We've got a ring in the bathtub we need you guys to take care of," said the man, without greeting. "And, we spilled. Spilled. soda. On the sheets. Gonna need you to change them."
I glowered at Clare. "No way I'm doing the sheets," I whispered harshly as soon as his back was turned. "'We spilled?!'"
"Fine," said Clare, thwacking a rag into my hand with a sigh. I was impressed by her composure, her maturity. "You get the ring."
Things sorta went downhill from there. Turns out it unsurprisingly wasn't soda, and that the ring in the bathtub was a viscose blackish-brown that I don't care to mentally revisit. We exited with Clare dragging a bursting bag of food trash, which hit a snag in the wooden deck. The trail of ooze-saturated coffee grounds was really a pleasure to sweep up.
But we had to be pleasant. "We put some extra towels in the bathroom for you-y'all have a great day!" we said.
Exeunt. Repeat from the top.
There was a lot that was funny about watching people liberally interpret the word "tip," leaving my sisters warm beer or romance novels or "a melted-together lump of low-carb candy." There was a lot that was funny about Clare finding a huge bloody stain on the mattress of one bed and, shrugging, simply spreading a clean fitted sheet over it. And there was a lot that was funny about the other employees-a toothless girl named Connie with a child and a powerful nicotine addiction; two Romanian women who actually drank the leftover "bierce" on break.
Yet however unpleasant any and all of this was for Clare and Bec, they seemed to eschew excessive complaining. Instead, they came home with funny stories. They learned how to fold tight hospital corners, tip appropriately. And they literally savored their time off.
Summer employment is weighing on me right now, as I struggle to find something to do. I've applied and been rejected and applied again, hoping some editor somewhere will come to view my hodge-podge of alleged skills as worthy.
My mom has her way of helping me along through the process. "You could always work at Smuggler's Cove," she says, archly.
She happens to view The Maid Thing as the crown jewel in my sisters' upbringing. She's started telling other mothers to make their children spend a summer in sanitation.
They invariably look dubious.
"Tim Russert worked every summer in college as a garbage man," she says in defense of her position. "If you work every summer as a garbage man or a maid, you will not flunk out of college."
"Besides," she says. "It's training. As an employer, you can't ask anyone to do something you haven't done for yourself."
I entertain the option. In this stressful season of internship-seeking, I can think of nothing so amusing as having the Career Center vet my cover letter for toilet-scrubbing.
Sarah Ball is a Trinity junior and former editorial page editor of The Chronicle. Her column runs every Thursday.
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