While the world reels at news of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, city maids tell Metro that stories of naked guests and screaming drunks are unfortunately too familiar.
One Flushing maid, who has worked at a Manhattan hotel for 15 years, told Metro a man once charged into a bathroom she was cleaning, asking, “You don’t mind?”
He dropped his trousers and started urinating before she could answer.
“Some guests, if they’re naked, we refuse to go in the room,” the woman, who didn’t give her name for fear of losing her job, continued. “One guy, he’s always naked when you go into the room, so everybody didn’t want to go.”
Most hotels’ maids are warned to call security if they enter a room and find a guest nude, which allegedly happened last Saturday when a maid said she entered Strauss-Kahn’s room at the Sofitel to find him naked.
One housekeeping director at a Midtown hotel, Marie Joseph, said she recently called security when she saw a drunk partier screaming. But if a customer is aggravated about a dirty room, or simply cranky, maids are told to simply keep smiling. “If a guest approaches you, even if he approaches you in a bad way, you have to try being nice,” she said.
‘You want to be careful’
Bill Weaver at Maid for You New York advises maids never to move wallets, lest they be accused of stealing, and also to prop open doors while they’re cleaning rooms.
“You never know who you’re dealing with, especially if you’re a female,” he said. “You want to be careful, you know, somebody walking in on you that you don’t know.”
