Email so nice, I wrote it thrice

Excerpt from an e-mail I sent today. Names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty.

Hiya Tina!

I can't quite remember what my questions were now! I am very slow on checking my emails, since I started working at the Hotel.

Prob'ly, when I first emailed you (or was it comment on your blog? I forget) I was mystified by something the cook told me. It came from the inspector. Fly swatters are "dirty" and must not be found/used in the restaurant or kitchen. EH?! So the flies that come into the restaurant from the rooms or the doors the customers open...what?! We let 'em just fly around and die of old age?! Catch 'em with our hands? HERD them out the door again? We cannot use chemical bombs around the food. Apparently, fly-paper is a no-no, like the flyswatters. Don't tell anyone, but the head cook stuck some sort of sticky clear "fly-tape" onto the back door, 2 strips about 6 inches by 2 inches each. One fly flew onto one of them, by accident, I think. They are too busy swarming around the garbage can, 3 feet away from the strips.

Hubby found the actual legislation for the "Food Service Industry" on the net. It has about one small paragraph about "pests", which covers insects, rodents, everything. It basically says, "Keep 'em out!" Nothing about flyswatters being too dirty to hang beside the kitchen back door.

I just read what I have written, and I sound crazy. Well, it's a weird situation. I feel a weird, strange, bizarre gratitude (!) to this job, because when I started, I weighed around 200 lbs, and I huffed and puffed my way through my cleaning chores. But I was eating way less, and getting excercise. Hell, this job is like a gym membership they pay ME for! And when I had to work in the kitchen...I was nervous enough that the LAST thing I wanted to eat was ANYTHING on the menu in there! So now, two months later, I am about 166 lbs. and I feel just like a SPRING CHICKEN! One who can borrow (some of) her daughter's clothes! Woot! (It's only first thing in the morning I feel totally elderly. Totally. Ibuprofen and caffiene are my best friends in the morning.)

Anyway, that's the scoop on my questions. Except...do you know if there are any rules about room-cleaning you could pass along? Or tell me how to find them on the net? Or have someone who works in a Real Hotel In The City email me and tell me how to do it? I am thinking I should be using the "Official Manitoba Government Sanctioned Bleach-Solution For Disinfecting, May Be Put In A Spray-bottle, Don't Forget To Label And Make New Stuff Every Week" on the toilets, tubs, floors, sinks in the bathrooms... Right now, we are using a commercial cleaner/disinfectant spray, and wiping down with a clean rag...but I know the instructions say to kill germs, we are supposed to leave it on for 10 minutes...HA HA HA. We smear it around with a clean rag, sure, but I dunno how disinfecting it is. I know the Bleach Solution sprayed on after the surface is cleaned and clean-looking would prob'ly be better. (It is AMAZING how weak the Official Solution is: TWO TABLESPOONS per gallon of water. I would use scented bleach, of course...)

Anyway, if you know any computer literate, friendly English-speaking cleaning-people who might want to educate a poor, ignorant (real meaning of that word!) country gal, please forward this email to them! I know you are the "Cute Gal Who Works At The Front Desk" type of hotel worker. That's why I'm not expecting you to answer these weird questions.

Anyway, Thanks for listening to my rant. (Reading my rant).Have y'all picked out your vacation destination yet? I'll have to go read your blogs now! Hee hee! I love to live vicariously through you young'uns.

Luv, Nargus' Mom

It's all in the details...

reprinted from my other blog

So today, we have found out for sure that SMALL THINGS MATTER. Especially when they are accidently sucked down the drain of a hotel kitchen sink.

The other night, I was working in the kitchen as the chief food heater 3rd string cook chef, and one of my duties is to wash the pots and pans. The waiter or waitress gets to wash ALL the customer's dishes, plates, cups, cutlery. (Tip your waiters well, they may have to work very hard where you cannot see!) Anyway, I was washing dishes too ('cause I'm a nice kid) and I was using a dishcloth. The young man didn't know about the dishcloth, and I left it...in the water. Yup, he pulled the plug. Slurp! And he didn't realize it. So when I pulled the plug on my last dishwater a lot later...hmmm...that's draining kinda slow...

I got to work early this afternoon, and all the bar toilets were overflowing, all the restaurant toilets were threatening to, all the kitchen sinks...well, you get the idea. The plumber was just starting to try to figure out where the blockage might be, and I told him that my dishcloth went missing last night. So they started there.

Heh heh heh...sure enough, there it was. The plumber's snake dragged it out. Wasn't looking too good, after it's little adventure. I found a nice little spot in the garbage for it, it won't be doing that again.

So now things are back to SNAFU at work. After they fixed the drain, I got to do more laundry, so tomorrow I should just be able to rock cleaning those rooms.

Today was a waste of time in the room cleaning department, it was so hot. I tried to pre-cool the rooms I was about to do, but somebody set the conditioner units on "stun". Big noise, no cooling: the dials were set to 1 instead of 10.

Yup, details matter. The customers need to find the right amounts of cups, coffee, sugars, glasses, soap, shampoo...all those things that make your hotel stay bearable. They will have to figure out how to work the air conditioners on their own, though. I will leave them set to "MAX".