tower motel excerpt 27 jan 2020
Anyway, you see that motel housekeepers might also have QC inspections done on their work. I wasn’t surprised one morning, after I’d been on the job about a month, when Bill walked into unit 12 and said he thought it would be a good idea if he inspected my work. That was okay by me, because I knew I did a good job, but I was a little miffed at him. … Now, of course, 12 is the farthest from the housekeeping closet, which is inside the laundry shed, between their house and number one. If you think you’ve had some dud grocery carts, you should have seen the wheels on my housekeeping wagon. Also, the sidewalk had more cracks than a bad comedian, so getting down to twelve was no picnic. This is why I was miffed at him.
Back then he could walk around, though not so well, because the M.S. affected his balance, but in he walked and announced he wanted to inspect my work. I was just about to get the clean top sheet tucked in nice and tight, so I had said “sure thing” and bent over to get on with it. …
when I bent over Bill started inspecting a whole lot more than my work, and his hands were doing most of the inspecting. It was like QC done by a blind man. To tell the truth I didn’t know what to do. He was the boss, or thought he was, sure, but he was also in a bad way, and I never thought Evelyn treated him so well, seeing he was sick with M.S., which meant he would die from it – or with it. Also, as I already wrote, I’m not so pretty, and I was sort of flattered that a man would jump me like that. Well, to make a long story short – and that day I helped something else long get shorter – before I knew it, I had that bed to make all over again, and another sheet to wash. I asked him if that was the reason he’d rented unit twelve, the far one, the night before, that this was all planned, and he said, no, it was just an accident. The way he grinned, though, I knew it’d been deliberate.
… Anyway, he never once complained about the quality of my product. He’d tried real hard that day, you know, but he was sick, and it wasn’t all that great. Somehow or other I couldn’t forget the extra work he’d made for me.