keeping house

my knees are bent, with my caps pressed hard into the tiled shower floor.  an unnatural Gatorade-blue mist is raining on my exposed hands and forearms and the choke of ammonia is scratching at the back of my nose and throat.  my eye itches, and had this been any other day I would scratch it, but just moments ago I took a tissue around the inner rim of a toilet bowl to check for discoloration.  for the last three days I joined the housekeeping staff at blackberry farm. 

to me it was like farming.  it’s an incredibly hard job made up of thousands of simple tasks.  the eye for detail required to see a vine-colored pest chewing on a vine, and the eye required to see the shimmer of a single cob web in a light fixture overhead—they're identical.  pushing grime off the counter--pulling a hoe.  hunched over the bed and tugging on a sheet—hunched over the earth and tugging up potatoes. 

also like farming, the customer’s appreciation of the finished product doesn’t recognize the unsung and dirty labor that goes into it.  sure, when you buy an heirloom tomato, or lie down onto a king size feather top, you know somebody grew the food or made the bed—but you still don’t really know what that means. 

each cottage at blackberry farm takes nearly two hours to turn over in between guests.  every surface in the entire room is cleaned, wiped, dusted, tested, touched, tilted, and brushed.  housekeepers are tested not only on their ability to clean, but also on the quality of the job done, and the time taken to accomplish it.  two hours per cottage.  sixty two room hotel.  do the math on that and complain about cleaning the dishes. 

as her and I continue to rotate through each department at blackberry, learning and working our way through a year long apprenticeship, building towards the confidence required to tackle our own dreams in this business, we are constantly challenging ourselves to understand not only the front lines, but to think from the bird’s eye as well.  housekeeping, for example, is one of the hardest departments in the hospitality business to manage.  extremely high turnover—relatively low paying—dirty, dirty work that most people don’t want to do.  how do you motivate? 

the woman who trained me at blackberry has been a housekeeper for sixteen years—eight of them at blackberry.  she cleans toilets, dirty beds, and trash.  while some who are not initiated to the world of luxury hospitality, you might assume that guests paying large sums of money for a hotel room must be well mannered enough to keep quite clean—and you’d be wrong.  the job is inglorious, to say the least, and she loves almost every day of it.  she is prideful, and a perfectionist, and untold thousands of guests in the last sixteen years have been the unknowing beneficiaries of her hard and sometimes disgusting work. 

to her, it’s not just a bed—are you kidding me??—a two foot thick tempur-pedic mattress topped with nearly two feet of feathers, multiple layers of linens of the highest thread count, and a feathery duvet.  fluffed, and tucked, and tugged, and smoothed.  it’s a mini masterpiece, is what it is, and it’s one of the most noticeable and memorable aspects of how a guest judges their hospitality experience—a good night sleep. 

but that’s just at the bottom of the barrel.  a good night’s sleep is what Abraham maslow would call a base need.  every hotel provides a bed, and the potential to sleep.  a guest, of course, needs that.  but to take that guest from a hotel experience, to a transformative hospitality experience, requires going above and beyond those recognized needs of a guest—food and shelter—to the unrecognized needs of a guest—like feeling valued, or having their favorite snack waiting for them in their room.  and a housekeeper who loves her job is attributing to that experience as much as the executive chef in the culinary barn—it’s just nobody knows it. 

it’s the aggregate that gets em’, you see.  it’s not the mouth watering filet in the dining room, or the knowledgeable guide on the fly fishing stream, and it’s not the fleet of lexus hybrids shuttling bodies too and fro.  it’s the sum, and it’s greater.  guests leave here having felt the level of service but can’t quite put their finger on when or how.  here, they call this phenomenon the blackberry state of mind—Elsewhere, by another name with the same meaning.  each little bit and speckle of the experience should flow together from one ripple to the next until it builds a tidal wave of good feelings and genuine hospitality to wash over the guests as they tuck themselves to sleep at night full of food and drunk on wine.    

to make a long tale short:  no matter where you are in life, or what you do, take a minute to stop and appreciate the housekeeper.