I have had enough terrible jobs throughout the twelve years that I’ve been legally employable that it actually takes a bit of sifting through bad memories to choose just one. My first job ever was working at a fast food chain where I was yelled and cursed at, manhandled and finally asked by my manager, when he hugged me on my last day, if I was wearing a bra. I was sixteen. But there were worse jobs to come. 

Yet it’s not the food service job serving slimy lunch meat and pink shredded lettuce on stale bread at a sub shop that sticks out in my mind as “the worst.” Nor is it the dishwasher job in a haughty English restaurant during which the front of my body was drenched for 8 hour shifts and I developed diaper rash on my thighs and stomach.  Not even cleaning up the various bodily functions of developmentally disabled men in a group home takes the title, though it’s a close second. The worst was definitely my two month stint as a maid for a cheap hotel whose managers proudly proclaimed that they did not rent by the hour, as was the automatic assumption. 

What was supposed to be my first day of work, I got food poisoning. I lay in bed, alternately shivering and sweating, and croaked my excuse into the phone to my new boss at the hotel. I didn’t need to fake sounding sick; I have rarely been so sick in my life. Still, I had been a constantly employed, if not always hard working, girl for almost four years. I knew the rules. Calling in on your first day was not good. I was sure that they would think I was putting on a very melodramatic sick voice so that I could stay home and sleep off a hangover and would tell me not to bother coming in. Ever. 

What should have tipped me off that this was no ordinary job—aside from the manager repeatedly asking me if I was sure I wouldn’t rather apply for a desk job when I turned in my application— was that my new boss didn’t sound put off in the least by me calling in. In fact, he seemed surprised, even tickled, that I had bothered to call in at all. He assured me that I would be welcome to come in whenever I felt better. Satisfied if not slightly befuddled at his pleasantness, I slipped back into delirium and didn’t resurface for two more days.  

When I arrived at work three days after my scheduled start date, I was again met with curious surprise on the part of the manager. I just didn’t get it. In fact, to a person who’d never made more than $5.30 an hour, the $9 they were paying seemed too good to be true. That and the flexible schedule that would allow me to go to my afternoon college classes made the job seem ideal. Why the big to-do over just showing up? It didn’t take too long to figure out the reason for the high turnover in housekeeping staff. 

The job worked like this: I was assigned a list of rooms and my shift was over whenever I finished cleaning them. No training videos, no paper work. Just show up, clean the rooms and at the end of each week I got a personal check from one of the two Indian brothers who owned the hotel franchise.  Salil—who dealt with the employees while his brother Arun did the book keeping— offered me a donut at the beginning of my first shift and then ushered me into a room full of giant washers, dryers and shelves of cleaning supplies. There he introduced me to Charity, the woman who would be training me. I smiled at Charity, who spared me half a glance and frowned at the partially eaten sugared donut in my hand (I found out later that staff typically weren’t allowed to eat the donuts because they were for guests). I turned to tell Salil that I would need to leave by 1:00 p.m. to make it to class but he was already gone. 

“Should I go tell him?” I asked Charity. “I can’t be late for my class.” 

She looked at me with undisguised scorn. “Ain’t nobody care about your schedule. You leave when the rooms is clean,” she said as she pushed past me with a cart of toilet paper, clean linens and unmarked bottles that emanated tear-inducing chemical smells. 

For the next four hours I nipped at Charity’s heels, asking questions about our duties and attempting to make a work friend. She ignored all of my attempts at small talk, answered my work inquires with clipped, monosyllabic responses and refused to make eye contact. I caught her exasperated eye rolls at my unskilled attempts to flick the top sheets over the bed. I was trying to mimic her technique, a simple yet calculated jerk of her wrists that made the sheet float down upon the bed, evenly covering the area so that only a few tucks at the end were necessary.  I, on the other hand, resorted to scurrying around the sides and tugging the uncooperative fabric into place. She finally relegated me to the bathrooms after my bed making skills proved too trying for her nerves.   

Later as I drove to campus, I was relieved to be done with what had easily been the most tense, difficult four hours of work in my life. My hands were dry and peeling after the cleaning supplies had come into direct contact with my skin because the only gloves available were extra large. My back ached from leaning over the beds and my hunger pains turned to roiling nausea when I thought of the skid marks, pubic hairs, urine and general scum I’d scrubbed off the bathroom surfaces, some of which appeared to have gone several weeks since their last cleaning.  

Things would be better once I was on my own to clean, I reassured myself. And Charity wasn’t so bad. She probably hated the job, and rightly so. I romanticized that she was a single mother, toughened by the hardships of life and afraid to trust new people who might screw her over like so many had in the past. She’d warm up eventually. We’d become friends and in no time I would be babysitting her kids and she would be buying booze for me and my underage friends. 

She never had the chance to dispel my ridiculous fantasy because Charity never showed up for another shift after that day. I heard later that she’d gotten a job at the Holiday Inn up the street.   

The next person I met was Mark. Mark was a stocky man in his fifties with his thick, graying red hair cut into a Dutch boy and a bushy orange moustache perched on his lip. Mark was Charity’s opposite. Friendly and warm, Mark suggested we clean our rooms together to make the time go faster. I was comfortable with Mark right away and so was shocked when by the second hour of work he told me he’d just been in jail for murder. I cautiously probed him for details, which he was all too happy to supply. It had been a drunken bar fight. Mark said that he never drank after that night but he did go on to kill two more people in prison. He told me that they were pedophiles and deserved it. No one had ever known it was him and he’d gotten out of prison early on good behavior. 

Over the next few days Mark regaled me with stories of his days in Vietnam where he’d had 78 confirmed kills and many dozens unconfirmed. Then he moved on to his time as a contract killer for the North Carolina mafia, an organization for which he’d performed twelve assassinations. He also confided in me that he was writing a science fiction novel and asked if I would read some of it. I asked why he wasn’t writing a non-fiction novel about his own life. He looked me in the eye and without a hint of irony said, “because there’s no statute of limitation on murder.” 

I liked Mark despite his homicidal tendencies. In part, because I reasoned that a genuine murderer probably wouldn’t gossip so freely about his exploits. So I guessed that Mark was most likely a pathological liar or suffering from delusions. Though there was always a residual doubt in my mind that maybe he wasn’t lying. Either way, he made the hours of drudgery go by faster. 

One of my other “coworkers” was Trish. I use quotes there because Trish didn’t actually work, she just watched TV in the rooms. She never changed the sheets on the beds and would spray the cleaners into the air rather than actually use them to clean anything. Trish was a wiry woman with a foul mouth. She never called me by my name, opting instead to refer to me by the lovely endearment of “fat hole.”  Trish washed her clothes and showered at work. I learned that this was because she was homeless and camped by the river. I only worked with her for a month. The last time I saw her she was a blur streaking down the hallway followed closely by a couple of huffing cops who were trying to arrest her for stealing from the guests. 

 After the first month, I had gotten into a rhythm with the job and became the fastest housekeeper, which was quite a feat considering I actually cleaned the rooms. I worked quickly so that I could get to class on time but Salil took advantage of my speed and starting doubling my room assignments. When I complained about this he only shrugged, saying he was trying to hire someone else and it couldn’t be helped. His eyes widened slightly at my suggestion that he assign a few more rooms to Mona and he only shook his head. 

Mona was a morbidly obese woman who had unofficially taken over the laundry. We were all supposed to help wash the linens, which only required putting a load in at the beginning of the shift, switching it to the dryer midway through and folding before you left. The fact that she had forcibly taken it over meant that she got to spend the entire shift holed up in the laundry room doing a fraction of the work the rest of us did. She and her 13-year old son, whom she brought with her to work most days, would sit at the window and smoke pot while Mark and I cleaned all the rooms. Salil assigned her no more than five rooms on a given shift and she made her son clean them.  

I didn’t blame Salil for not wanting to confront Mona over her lack of productivity because she was, quite honestly, frightening. She missed a few days of work one time because she was arrested for going to a woman’s house and beating her so severely the woman ended up in the hospital. Mona spoke of the incident to me once when she was particularly high and feeling communicative. She said her son’s father had been seeing the woman on the sly. I asked if she’d broken up with him and she said she couldn’t. When I asked why she couldn’t her reply was simple: she needed a big dick and he had one. I didn’t pursue any more heart-to-hearts with Mona. 

My breaking point came at the end of my second month. I was barely making it to my classes on time anymore. I started to smell the hotel on my clothes and hair after work, a repellant odor I’d never noticed in the beginning. I fixated on the smell all throughout my classes, and was desperate to get home and shower most days. I had also started a swift descent into germaphobia as I witnessed how truly disgusting people could be when someone else had to clean it up.  

The last week I was there I changed sheets that someone had used as toilet paper, cleaned a bathroom in which a guest used the toilet more as a general area to aim than an actual receptacle and scraped pizza off a floor that someone had taken pains to ground into the carpet with their foot. None of which was as disgusting as the number of rooms I cleaned that were apparently untouched accept a slight rumpling of the bedspread. Prostitution is not confined to big cities as was my naïve, small town belief before that job. But I wasn’t disgusted because I had some strict moral objections to the trade itself. I was disgusted because I knew we didn’t wash the bedspreads. The cheap polyester disintegrated in our industrial washers.  

I finally found another job serving at an Ethiopian restaurant. I knew I wouldn’t make as much money because I was sure Ethiopian food was a little too adventurous for most of the folks in my small town. But I needed out. I quit the day I got the new job. I felt guilty because I knew Mark would get stuck with all the extra work but I just couldn’t face it anymore. A few months later I drove by the hotel and noticed through the glass walls of the reception area that Mark was sitting at the front desk. That made me feel better; he had been vying for a front desk job for the entire time I had worked there. I was glad he’d finally gotten it and hoped the position allowed him time to write so that he could finish his novel.  

I also hoped that he hadn’t killed anyone else lately.