Tipping the maid

Last week, in San Antonio, I was sitting in a restaurant by the River Walk with some friends. We were about to pay our bill, and discussed the tips. We're not used to tipping where I come from. For most types of services, it's all included.

I learnt about tipping when we lived in Colorado. You should tip about anyone who provides you a service; waiters, taxi drivers, hair dressers, and room maids (but not room mates). I reminded my friends that they should tip the maid before checking out of the hotel (some of them where leaving the next day).

(In a fair world people like me would be paid less, and the maids would be paid more. I know this sounds like a socialist thing to say, and I guess I'm kind of socialist at heart, at least in theory, and sometimes I even try to practice.)

The maids are doing a nasty job cleaning our rooms, and they don't get much paid for it. I know, because one of them once told me. This happened many years ago in New Orleans, before Katarina destroyed the city.

I stayed in Hotel Monteleone, an old hotel with a historic atmosphere in the French Quarter. One day I returned to my room to pick up some stuff I had forgotten, and I came in while the maid was cleaning my room. She asked where I came from (I'm speaking English with an accent), and then we had the conversation going. She was a cute Afro-American girl, grown up in New Orleans. She had two little kids, and was totally relying on tips to make enough money to keep it going. Her salary was less than $5 per hour (she said).

In the morning the day before I left, I met her in the corridor outside my room. She told me that she had her day off the next day, which was my checkout day (she probably new from her room list). It was a discrete hint that I should leave her the tips one day early. Otherwise it would end up with a different maid.

So, this is what I did: I put $50 on the desk in my room, $10 for each day she had cleaned my room, and wrote on a note that it was her tips (she was a very cute girl). When I came back to my room that night, there was a box wrapped in gift paper on my bed, and a card signed "Best Wishes, Your Maid".

I unwrapped the parcel. In the box there was a small ceramic bathtub with the hotel's logo. She had stolen it in the hotel's stock of bathroom accessories. I brought the bathtub back home, and had it for many years in my office, with pens and pencils in it.

Now the bathtub is lost and gone. I don't know where, but I'm sure I'll book in at Hotel Monteleone the next time I make it to New Orleans >:)

(The picture above has nothing to do with the story above, which took place before the advent of digital cameras. However, New Orleans and Austin both reminds me of great live music, jazz and blues, respectively. The picture was taken by a friend of mine, some years ago, when we happened to spend a night on 6th Street in Austin, Texas.)