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(Boston, MA, 09/29/14) Xiomara Nerino, (far left) employee at the Double Tree Hotel along with her co-worker, Emma Perdomo (far right) teaches Hannah McShea, 19, (center), a Harvard student how to make a bed at Harvard’s Science Center Plaza. Monday, September 28, 2014 (Staff Photo by Faith Ninivaggi)
HOW IT’S DONE: Emma Perdomo, left, a housekeeper at Allston’s Doubletree Hotel, along with her co-worker, Xiomara Nerino, center, shows 19-year-old Harvard student Hannah McShea how to make a bed at Harvard’s Science Center Plaza yesterday.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make a bed.
But some of the nation’s leading brainiacs — Harvard students — don’t know how, and they humbly accepted instruction on the subject yesterday from the experts: hotel maids.
“The process is very tedious. There’s a lot that goes into it. I mean, we had all these sheets and covers and blankets, and we didn’t know where they went,” said freshman Shantel Williams, 18, of Detroit. “And so we’re like putting the sheet down and they’re like, ‘No, no, no. You have to put it right there.’ And we’re like, ‘OK.’ The longer pillow has to go behind the shorter pillow. I didn’t realize there was a difference. They had it tight. We couldn’t get it tight. There’s just a lot that goes into the process that I never knew, or never appreciated, either.”
Since 2012, some students have been supporting the unionizing efforts of workers at a Doubletree Hotel in Allston on land leased by Harvard. Harvard said in a statement it wants Hilton — which owns the hotel — and its workers to find a fair way to resolve the labor dispute. Students at the bed-making session said they wanted to show how demanding the work is. One housekeeper used a bullhorn to guide the Ivy Leaguers through the process.
Housekeeper Emma Perdomo, 54, of Honduras said in her house the kids are no different than most Harvard students on that score — mom makes the bed.
“A lot of mothers really want to do these things for their kids,” she said through a translator, who said, “In her house her husband always yells at her kids to do the bed and her kid always waits until mom does it for him. Kind of the way it goes,” she said.
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