She Works Hard For Her Money

The sunset from our balcony

So, the overnight shift. Definitely a whole new ballgame. The best part, aside from working with pastry for eight hours, is the night cleaning routine. Oh Lord, it’s hilarious. Around midnight the crew of four Spanish speaking cleaners come in–and they come in with style. Talking and joking, they bring their boombox and blare hot Latin cambios all night long–they’re a great group of people, totally fun and happy and energetic. They scrub every inch of the restaurant and clean in places that the average person wouldn’t even think to clean.

My favorite part is when they wash the floor. They concoct a magical cleaning solution–their cauldron is a GIANT (we’re talking 4 feet long x 4 feet deep x 2 feet wide) Lexan (it’s a swimming pool). They dump this out all over the floors–so there’s an inch or more of sudsy water over the entire kitchen floor. You can imagine how this effects the whole working situation. The newly made kitchen ocean makes tasks like carrying eggs across the hallway a real adventure. Can we say “Slip ‘n Slide“?!

At this point the Latin Super Cleaners don their waders and are ready to go to town (or perhaps go fly fishing). Grabbing their scrubby brooms they set to work on the floors. When the scrubbing is done, they get out the hose (I think it may actually be a real fireman’s hose) and transform the kitchen into Lake Mead–SO MUCH WATER. (Needless to say, by this point, my worn out leather kitchen shoes are water shoes–I’m ankle deep in H�O and my socks feel like swamp moss). Finally, (the kitchen is big, so this floor-cleaning process takes quite a while) a few hours later, they squeegee the sparkling clean floors. It’s quite the experience! If you’ve seen the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where they’re all covered with suds, you can imagine what the night cleaning experience feels like.

I’m still a little bit confused about when I’m supposed to sleep, but having the whole day to myself is great! I have time to work out and go to the pool (I haven’t been this tan since Canc�n!)…I’ll figure out the sleep thing later.