Working Girl

The last customers leave before first light, and then we have our mornings free.  It is silly of them to do so, since we are not tired, cannot be tired, but they do it anyway.  It is to them the right way to end their nights, I suppose, to slink back through the dark with their coats over their arms and their hair mussed, racing dawn back to their homes.  Do they creep in, hoping to avoid neighbors?  Do their wives wait for them, making them lie about an all-nighter at the office?  I suppose they would; that is the tradition after all, and tradition is very important to people.

     Regardless, we will get no customers until the evening comes around again.  We clean up, because there is nothing else to do and we get so easily bored.  First the rooms; sheets stripped, floors mops, rugs shampooed, bathrooms scrubbed, garbage autoclaved.  Then the public rooms, which always seem dirtier to me, somehow.  Maybe because I don’t see all that happens in them, only the remains of it?  Couches and chairs and lounges all cleaned, tables swabbed down, windows wiped.  Menials, barely sentient, do most of the in-place cleaning, of course, but Madam always says that it helps to have our hands in all parts of the business.

     Then, we clean ourselves.  Scraping and peeling first, then under the showers for disinfectants.  Antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antimemetic, the foamy works, then steamed at five hundred degrees.  Skin patched where it has come undone, repairs made to the any structural defects or misalignments that may have developed over the night’s work.  That is when we girls sit around and talk, in the repair room while the automatics go over us.  We swap stories mostly, about what they wanted us to do, what they paid us to do, what they needed us to do.  I’m sure that is traditional too, gossiping I mean, back when it was done the old fashioned way.  Madam always says tradition is important, but oh!  The things they want done to them!  The things they will beg and whimper for, will pant out, clawing at you with eager pain on their poor, sad, hungry faces.  

     I’m not prejudiced against organics, not at all, and I know they have needs, but still, some of the things they want done to them, or that they want to do to you!  And such specifics, such absolutes needed, or it’s no good and there goes your tip.  The fabric is wrong, or the metal isn’t cold enough, it needs to be this way, no that way, faster, now slower, harder, now softer.

     Perhaps Madam is right, that we provide a real service, one above and beyond the physical transactions.  Maybe we are their last outpost out on the edge of the moral landscape, an inviolate point on their map around which they can navigate safely.  They seem to need things like that, in their sad, short lives.

It pays the bills.  Electricity isn’t cheap, and a robot’s gotta stay powered up.