December 9, 2012

What a difference a competent manager makes...

I think I figured out a way to conquer the snooze button problem... adding my cell phone in as an alternate alarm so I have to hit snooze twice as often, which wakes me up more effectively. Worked like a charm this morning!

Today was an interesting day at work. Which is saying a lot because let's face it, being a maid at a major Mystery Hotel Chain is not that interesting.

Thanks to my skive day yesterday, I was oblivious to the staff meeting that started at 9am this morning. I showed up at 10am and had missed most of the meeting already, but I did get there in time for the Housekeeping manager to basically chew the entire maid staff a collective new asshole. Then I got called up to her office for a one-on-one meeting, which made me pretty nervous after my lateness, my skive day, and the fact that I know I'm well behind the curve as far as work performance.

It turns out she just wanted to straighten out all the lack of training I got as a result of being the only part-time new hire. She had been away my first two weeks so hadn't been able to check in until now, only to find that nobody bothered to actually train me properly. Rather than sending me off on my own again, she paired me up with an extremely skilled and very nice gentleman maid (about 85% of the maids are dudes, which is sort of hilarious) who taught me some actual useful tricks that required very little short-cutting to get the rooms clean. Frankly, they should have sent me out with this guy much sooner because I finally learned the real trick to putting a duvet cover on in under 30 second, without breaking your arms - or even a sweat - in the process.

I'm still going to keep looking for another job, because this one is really just too physically intense for me at this point, and also it pays terribly (just a hair above minimum wage and about 25% under London living wage). But at least I feel less stressed about this job in the meantime.

Random observation of the day: I always feel kind of bad when people tell me their English is "not so good." I've yet to meet someone who told me that whose English skills are not perfectly acceptable. Not to mention the fact that I certainly don't speak a second language, like, at all, so as far as I'm concerned they're a hell of a lot better at languages than I am. I wish they'd stop being so hard on themselves... I admire the hell out of them.

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