Labels for the Night Team

When visitors toured the hotel laundry, they usually met the daytime supervisor. Behind him, clean sheets moved through large machines. Nobody mentioned the night team, who dealt with late deliveries and prepared everything for the busiest morning hours.

Pavel worked nights and rarely complained. Yet the hotel's new website described the laundry as an automatic service. He read the sentence during his break while rubbing a sore thumb. Automatic, he thought, must mean that people are working where guests cannot see them.

He did not want his photograph online. Instead, he asked whether the website could explain what the different teams actually did. The communications assistant invited him to check a draft. Pavel replaced a sentence about clever machines with one about workers sorting damaged sheets by hand. He also corrected the time when the morning delivery left.

The finished page was hardly dramatic. Still, a new employee arrived knowing that night work required judgment as well as physical effort. She asked Pavel to show her how to identify a sheet that needed repair. He held one under the light and pointed to a thin patch. It was a small lesson, but at least their work now had a description that belonged to them.