Sunday, 20th July, 2008

So still on the subject of work and my history, back in the day I worked as a chambermaid. I am sure that the PC term these days is something like 'household services operative' but I was a chambermaid and not a very good one but hey, I was very young, still in school, it paid peanuts so there you go. But it was a lot of fun… or funny…. or maybe both. In one hotel I was on early shift for most of time, which meant in those days, wake up calls involving reading the list and knocking on doors 'Good Morning! This is your wake up call!' If they had ordered tea or coffee we waited for the reply 'come in.' and then delivered said beverage. Depending on what card game (see below) I had attended the night before my attention to detail was not always the best. One very, very polite and charming chap knocked on the door of the chambermaids' room - actually a closet with a kettle, instant coffee, teapots and teabags and spare sheets and towels, and said 'I'm awfully sorry but this tea is quite weak.' I looked. I had forgotten to put a tea bag in the pot. And he was apologising to me! Bless his little cotton socks. I made him a proper pot of tea. He was a nice traveling salesman, they ratio out at about 1:100.

Another guy though, I knocked, he said 'Come in.' and there he was, on the bed, stark bollock naked with this ridiculous smile on his face. He asked 'See anything you like?' I replied politely 'Not a damn thing.' Put his coffee down on the bedside table and left. These days I would have accidentally tripped and sent the coffee elsewhere but back then I was still relatively polite and these days I am sure he would cover up and be disappointed that the chambermaid is a troll. But what a plonker.

Card games. Every hotel, and I do mean every hotel in the world, has a card game going on somewhere in the back. Even more so if the staff live in. When you work long hours, split shifts and unsociable hours (i.e. weekends, holidays, times when normal people have time off, when you cannot go to things like concerts, family holiday celebrations, weddings, etc.,) what you do is socialise with your 'hotel family' and others who work those kinds of shifts, mostly, oddly enough, police and medical people and then what you do is play cards, and drink a bit.

One evening a very persistent traveling salesman (or whatever the PC term is these days) kept asking 'I can't sleep, is there a card game in the hotel?' He asked over and over again. So we let him in. We were playing brag, a type of poker. He obviously thought he had found a bunch of youngsters and was going to clean up. And don't get me wrong, he was good. But this is the moral of the story: 'Never, ever, try to infiltrate an hotel staff family and screw with them, and never, ever think that they will not close ranks to the outsider. Believe me all you business people/traveling sales-people, you are and always will be, outsiders. One of us was a lovely girl, her name was Sue. She was a receptionist. Very pretty, shoulder-length legs, boobs in the days before cheap implants that were all that and a bag of chips, delightful girl, but not the brightest, in fact the one ball-bearing brain cell probably only hit the little dip in the middle of the hand-held plastic maze completely at random every now and then but we were all very fond of her. Had her heart broken so many times but that's another story. So anyway this d*ckhead started to gamble, and we let him win a few times to get the bets up. Then we nailed him by playing/betting/rigging the cards to let Sue win. Was he ever pissed off? It was hilarious.