Do You Ever Wonder If Somebody Died in the Hotel Bed You're Sleeping In?

Before I was a failed warehouse manager, I cleaned to earn a living. Well, I did many weird little jobs to earn a living, including owning a business, but that's beside the point. If you want to read about my adventures in employment, check out my book, I'm Not the Manager Here!

I've cleaned homes privately and been a housekeeper in creeptastic little motels. I enjoyed the latter more. Although being a private cleaner provided countless opportunities for snooping through others' belongings (I realize I'm really cutting myself off from future job opportunities here), the experience of cleaning hotels and motels is real, man.

I don't know what drew me to housekeeping, but when I moved to Victoria, BC when I was 19, I hounded the GM of a popular hotel chain until he gave me a housekeeping job. After a particularly demoralizing experience as a coffee slinger, I set out to find new work in the city and became obsessed with the idea of cleaning hotel rooms.

I had dropped off my resume at a hotel on the popular Yates St., but when the manager advised me they weren't hiring, I decided not to take no for an answer.

I stopped by to "chat" with the manager every day for the next seven days, and on the seventh day, he said, "Okay, okay, Lindsay, you wore me down! You can have a housekeeping job!"

Because of this experience, I never really worry about finding work.

Even now, at almost 40 years old, looking down the barrel of unemployment with a shit ton of debt and the looming anxiety of unpaid bills, here I am writing this dumb story instead of trying to find gainful employment.

I'm on the job boards 90% of my day at this point.

In the back of my brain, I believe that if I need to find work, I'll find it. That could also be my privilege talking. Coming from oil-rich Alberta, I've rarely lived in places that were short of menial labour jobs.

Working at the hotel in the heart of Victoria was an exercise in observing the absurd.

From finding out that the hotel staff sprayed the water glasses with Windex to "clean" them to learn the most efficient way to get pubes out of a bathtub, I felt like I learned something new every day.

I once walked into a room in the smoking section of the building and found a guy had overdosed in the bathtub. That was probably the grimmest discovery of my time there.

During my training period, a fellow housekeeper explained that they never shove their hands under the pillow on a bed without looking first because often, people would leave their hypodermic needles stashed under there.

It was unclear as to why.

It didn't take me long to appreciate her hot tip as I indeed was finding used needles tucked away in the folds of the bedding, like terrifying spikey mints.

I asked my coworkers if they had ever found a dead body in the bed, and an older lady I worked with said she indeed had, but not at this hotel.

"You'd be surprised how many people die in a hotel bed," she said, Windexing the water glasses.

Of course, I tried to pry more information out of her, but she was the type of woman who liked to make large, sweeping statements and follow them up with exactly zero context. She simply gave me a curious shrug and pushed her cleaning cart to the next room.

I've never been able to forget that, though. I always just assumed that a hotel would, I dunno, throw out a bed that had a deceased body in it. That surely seems like the sanitary thing to do.

Now, though, whenever I find myself snuggling into a communal hotel bed, I can't help but wonder.

Did somebody die in this thing?