ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

In the time I’ve spent traveling, there is one thing that consistently buoys my spirits and allows me to lift my head up each morning to face another day of office visits.

It’s called housekeeping.

There is a special thrill I feel when I return to my room at the end of the day and see that the magical cleanliness elves have visited and refreshed my towels, bedding, and miniature soaps. I know it wouldn’t be the same if I was traveling for leisure, either. The whole magic of it is that I never see the actual transformation. When I leave, my towels are damp and left on the counter, and when I come back, they have been replaced with new ones, which are neatly folded by some arcane technique I could never duplicate on my own. If I actually saw the housekeeping staff, it would destroy the illusion.

The kind of sick thing about it is that unlike some people, who are extra sloppy when they know someone will be picking up after their stupid asses, I inexplicably become neater because I know it will make someone else’s life harder if I don’t. So I don’t leave my crap lying all over the room. Someone might need to vacuum. And I don’t cover every surface with my stupid junk. Someone might need to wipe there. And I never, ever do things like leave dirty underwear on the bed or on the bathroom floor. Someone might see it and be totally grossed out.

Instead, I pick up my room every morning and put everything I don’t want to be in the maid’s way in my suitcase. And I line up all my toiletries on a folded hand towel. I also fold my damp towels (and the little bathroom floor mat) neatly and leave them stacked all in one place. In my mind’s eye, my room is the best one the maid has gotten to clean that day. Possibly even that week. Or that month. I know that men can do housekeeping, too, but in my mind the maid is a short woman with a feather duster. She hums as she works, and sometimes maybe she uses my round hairbrush as a microphone and lip syncs to a Doris Day song on the radio. I picture this fictitious maid nodding in satisfaction as she surveys my room. That is why she goes to the extra trouble of folding the last square of toilet paper into a little triangle and putting a little gold seal on it. And that is why she draws the curtains back just so, to let the light in for me. And that is why she does not leave me the bad towels, the ones that someone’s old shit stain still hasn’t been bleached out of. I like to imagine that the maid looks forward to cleaning my room, because all she has to really do is collect and replace the towels and make the bed. I hope she knows that I do this on purpose, to make her life easier. I mean, she is working as a maid and I bet that is a real drag sometimes. I want to be the high point of her housekeeping day.

The only hotel that has ever failed me in the housekeeping department is the Holiday Inn Express of Grand Rapids, the one with the large pool complex thing with all the slides and stuff. I will also note that the time they failed to visit my room was the one time I got all my towels wet and did not hang any of them up, and then I had no clean towels at all for the next day. I was bitterly disappointed and it kind of ruined my shower the next morning since none of them were dry by then.