Between The Sheets

Customer Servces

Between The Sheets
by T. Scott  Gross



Some kid must have designed the laundry delivery system. It’s a tube that runs 20 stories along the spine of the building until it and the dirty laundry it carries falls out of the ceiling in the laundry room.   

“If you feel a whoosh of air, better move away from the chute,” Sammie warned.  “That stuff can hurt you!”      

It could and it does. You don’t have to be hit by laundry to be hurt by it. It gets your back and legs, your arms and feet. Laundry, when it falls out of the concrete sky by the ton, gets to you one way or the other!       

Some laundry is contaminated by blood or whatever. That stuff comes down separately. Contaminated laundry gets special attention, treated like the hazardous material that it is. It is disinfected before being thrown away. Yuck!

The real gross stuff comes from the kitchen. Soured stuff. Greasy stuff. Anything cold and slimy you-can-imagine stuff.

“Here. We gotta bag from the kitchen. ‘You want to help?” 

“Sure!” 

“You want gloves?” 

Now, the head housekeeper was watching from across the room. She saw what was happening and must have been horrified that a ‘suit’ might encounter a little goo.  She raced to get gloves even without hearing…

“…do you wear gloves?”    

“Naw, I just wash my hands. But some people wear gloves.”       

“Is there any safety reason?”       

“Nope. Just nasty.”       

“If you don’t need em, I don’t.”

      

At this moment, the head housekeeper arrived, snapping a new pair of bright yellow gloves from a box and holding them high.       

“Mr. Scott! Mr. Scott! I have gloves for you!”

Too late. I was elbow deep in yuck.

“He don’t need no gloves,” Sammie explained to the horrified woman! “He don’t need no gloves ‘cause he’s just like us.”

Sammie smiled and realized that the day would not be as long as he had imagined.       

I smiled inwardly because I knew that I had just joined the team. 

It was nasty.  We sorted slop from more slop while mentally I sang the refrain, “Great green globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts, mutilated  monkey meat, dirty little…” 

“So what gets you out of bed and brings you to the laundry every day?”

“These people are my friends. I like to work with them.”

“Yes, but this isn’t really what you would call a glamorous job. No windows. It’s hot. The work is tough.” 

“You get used to it. Besides, here I’ve learned a lot. I can repair the machines. I understand plenty about the chemicals. And, like I said, I like the people. They’re my friends.”       

Sammie was separating and washing, shaking and folding right along with the rest of the crew. “I never ask people to do anything that I’m not willing to do. They know that. They can see that!” 

And they could. Take your fancy theory and…press it! If you have good people, leaders have little to do. Sammie is right there with the best of them. The entire operations seemed to work without direction. Work got done. Everyone, except the new kid, seemed to know exactly what needed to be done next and how to do it. Teams formed, completed a task, and then reformed to tackle the next task. 

You could learn a lot in a laundry.

Like ants, there was little apparent leadership, yet somehow, things were getting done. 

The theory, if you need one, revolves around the notion that teams practice collective reasoning. Similar to parallel processing where many computers are linked together to quickly solve problems that an individual computer might never solve.  Parallel processing, better call it team intelligence, happens when individual team members solve a little piece of the problem, seemingly without connection, but mysteriously working with others on the team. 

After lunch, the big guy put me on folding. Actually, I put myself on the job after checking with Sammie to be sure there wasn’t something more urgent that needed attention. I folded and folded and folded, dragging towels and bath mats from a bottomless plastic cart. I must have folded a million pieces. Yeah, that’s right, a million.  And I could prove it, too, if that short woman hadn’t kept hauling it away. 

Now, here’s a point. People like to be able to see a job from beginning to end.  There are unknown ways to measure, to keep score, the simplest of which must be to count. How big is the pile of sawdust? How many days have you been in that cell? How many towels are folded neatly on the table? 

But that short woman kept hauling them off! I couldn’t get a decent count. The pile would grow. Then it would disappear. 

How do you count? How do your employees count? Do you haul away the towels before they get a good measure? 

At one point Sammie walked over to our gondola and calculated, somehow, that we had managed to fold 679 towels into the press in one hour. It was, he thought, some kind of record. While Sammie praised, I puffed, thinking, ‘Writer Boy strikes again!’  And later I would think about how anyone might find joy or at least satisfaction in a job, any job, well done. First, they must have a way of keeping score.

Five, four, three, two, one. I folded towels right up to the minute. Four o’clock.  Another hour and a bed of nails would have looked inviting.

So, Writer Boy, what did you learn in the laundry?

I learned that all work is good work if you are working with people that you like.  I learned that there really is such a thing as team intelligence. I learned that once you get to know someone, if only a little, you can work better together. And I learned that working in a hotel laundry is tough work for tough people, made worse when the guests are cheerleaders. (They inconsiderately use too many towels and smear them with makeup.) Some of the prettiest people I know work in the laundry, no makeup required!

At shift’s end, I dragged myself to my room and immediately felt out of place.

I shed shoes, socks and uniform in pieces as I shuffled across the room to wash up. In the bathroom, I splashed a haggard-looking face with cold water and lathered tired hands. Then, reaching for a towel to dry, I froze.

Nah! I shook the water from my hands. No point in dirtying another towel!


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T. Scott Gross. All right reserved. For information contact Frog Pond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@frogpond.com.