The start of summer has gotten me all nostalgic about the many summers that have come and gone in my life.

The summer that I was fifteen I worked at the local resort as a housekeeper. I had worked at a local pizza place previously and not enjoyed the intense customer service experience (especially when one customer was so angry she made me cry, but more on that later). Surely I, an introvert who enjoyed clean spaces, would do much better as a solitary, silent housekeeper.

There were three white people in the housekeeping department at this resort: the boss lady, me, and another girl my age who was married to a Mexican-American man. Everyone else was from Mexico; some very recently arrived, but many had lived in this town longer than my own family had. Spanish was the common language of our crew, and I was the odd one out with my meager ability to count to ten and name the colors. The other white girl my age was kind enough to translate for me and try to include me when she could despite our extremely different backgrounds and life situations (married at fifteen!!!).

Working as a housekeeper at the local resort was a good job, but it was a hard job too. They were understaffed and most of us worked six days a week all summer long. Every morning I would wake up, put my hair up in a bun and pull on my regulation resort polo and black pants. I would walk down the hill a mile into town. We would all receive our work assignments on clipboards in the morning, and take the master key for our particular hallway and building. Then we headed out.

I usually worked alone, which was how I preferred it. The boss lady and assistant boss lady would circulate with their walkie-talkies all day checking our progress which we all dutifully recorded on our clipboards.

My days that summer were defined by “make-ups” and “check-outs.” Make-ups were easy: wipe down the bathroom, replace towels and toiletries, make the beds, take out the garbage, vacuum. I could easily complete a make-up in fifteen minutes as long as the guests hadn’t trashed the place. The difficulty with make-ups was in the timing, and I became very adept at noticing when people were leaving so I could rush over and do their room immediately. Often I was assigned the same hallway all week and I would learn the habits of the guests and know which families were going to already be at the beach at 8 AM and who wasn’t going to leave their room until lunchtime.

I got tipped less than five times the entire time I worked at this resort, and I don’t know if this is a regional thing or what, but I was very surprised to learn that a lot of normal, middle-class people tip the hotel maid when they check out. They definitely weren’t tipping in my town! One time I went into a make-up with a kitchenette and found a twenty dollar bill along with a note asking me to do all the dishes. I was happy to oblige.

The resort had five big buildings full of hotel rooms and suites, but there were a few special buildings too. The resort owned an older building in town that had several apartments, all un-updated with beautiful wood floors and cabinetry and cool vintage kitchens. I cleaned those a few times and was delighted with the layers of age in those places. There was a big multi-story cabin in the center of the resort and I recall thinking that this cabin was the height of luxury, a rich person’s dream. I am pretty sure I could afford to stay there now and that blows my mind.

If a maid finished her hallway early she would then be assigned to help someone else who was still struggling to finish their hallway. It was in these afternoons when I was working with the other housekeepers that I finally started to learn some useful Spanish. My coworkers always turned the television to El Gordo y La Flaca when we were working, and the ones who knew enough English would translate the especially funny parts for me, teaching me new words along the way. I learned the word for clothes hanger in Spanish, and still remember that each room was supposed to have ocho ganchos in the closet. I vacuumed each rincon very thoroughly.

I don’t remember ever getting yelled at in this job. I think I had an advantage as a white teenage girl because when I knocked on a door and a very tired young mother “on vacation” answered to tell me to please come back later we could easily determine a better time for maid service together. All of my coworkers knew enough English to have the same conversation, but it was stilted and stressful for the white vacationers.

“One o’clock!” I would hear a white lady practically yelling at my coworker down the hall. “You understand? Uno! Uno o’clock is bueno!” The guests weren’t necessarily trying to be rude or mean, they just assumed the brown-skinned lady with the cart full of tiny shampoos didn’t understand a word of English.

I don’t mind cleaning, but cleaning up after other people can be its own special hell. Some guests were extremely messy, and navigating our big heavy vacuums around piles of clothes on the floor made make-ups more difficult than they needed to be. We never wanted to touch a guest’s items so we would very carefully push dirty clothes a few inches with our shoes and then do our best with the vacuum. Some guests totally ripped apart their beds and left wet towels in random places. A lot of people left garbage all over the room, and sometimes it was difficult to determine what was meant to be thrown away and what was being saved.

Overall, the housekeeping team worked well together. The boss lady wasn’t too good to jump in and help make a bed if we were hustling to finish a check-out in time, but there were some… issues. They did not give us toilet brushes to clean the inside of the toilet. I was taught on my first day to spray the inside of the bowl with the usual cleaning spray and then use my hand and a rag to wipe it, getting my bare hand down into the water if needed. I was horrified, and to this day I wonder how common a practice this is in hotels. If I didn’t want to do it, I was told, I could bring in my own toilet brush and carry it with me every day. I didn’t want to do that either, and somehow I managed to put my hand in toilet water only once that whole summer.

I got very efficient with hospital corners and I learned lots of neat tricks for making the bathroom look more clean. Even today I still wipe a little glass cleaner in my bathroom sink after cleaning it to give it that even shinier, cleaner look. I got a lot of practice with always going from top to bottom, cleanest to dirtiest, strategies I use almost every day in my current life. But I also learned that hotels almost never change out the comforter and that any glass cups in the room were probably just wiped down with glass cleaner and not actually cleaned before you showed up.

The summer ended on a sour note when I developed a terrible hacking cough that just wouldn’t go away. I went to the doctor, who was not surprised at my cough once she heard about my summer job.

“It’s that cleaning spray they use,” she explained. “We’ve seen a lot of the resort housekeepers here with the same thing.” My mother was horrified. She wrote a letter to management about their negligence in forcing the housekeepers to use these harsh chemicals, and she bought me a bottle of Soft Scrub so I wouldn’t have to use the harsh green spray. But I continued to use the spray (it was so efficient!) through the end of August at the resort.

I went back to high school in September with a solid start to my savings account and a hacking cough that did eventually go away. It had been a good job, a great learning experience on a lot of levels, and I’m glad I did it. I still think about those old apartments regularly, and that $20 bill I got for doing ten minutes of dishes.

I know you are all wondering: do I tip the maid when I stay at a hotel now? I do not. Having cleaned hundreds of rooms and been tipped so infrequently it still strikes me as odd to tip the maid. But I don’t let my kids scatter clothes all over, and I try to make it obvious that yesterday’s paper is supposed to go in the garbage.

And I try really hard to not touch the comforter. Ew.