Linen is counted out of the van and counted back into it, by two people, because the laundry charges by the item. One house returns twenty nine pieces when twenty eight went in, and has done for four years.
I have a cleaning business. Eight of us, forty one properties, changeovers all summer.
Linen is the part of this job that people outside it never think about and the part that eats your margin, so we count it like money.
Every property has a linen set. Number eleven's set is twenty eight pieces: four duvet covers, four flat sheets, twelve pillowcases, four bath towels, four hand towels. That is written on a card in the van and it has been the same card since 2019.
We take a clean set in and bring the dirty set out, in a red bag, and the red bag goes to a commercial laundry who weigh it and count it and invoice us per item, and their count is on the invoice.
So there are three counts: mine going in, mine coming out, and the laundry's. They agree, across forty one properties, week in week out, because if they did not I would have no business.
Number eleven comes back with twenty nine.
The extra is always a pillowcase, and it is always the same pillowcase.
I say that with confidence because it is not one of ours. Our pillowcases are a hotel grade percale with a woven label in the seam with the supplier's name on it and a size, and we have hundreds of them and they are all identical.
This one is cotton, heavier, with a plain hem and a small embroidered line of three flowers in one corner in blue thread. It is older than anything in my stock. It is the kind of thing that was in everybody's airing cupboard in about 1975.
What happens to it.
For the first two years it went to the laundry with everything else and came back with everything else, and I would pull it out of the clean set and put it in the rag bin, and the rag bin gets collected, and the next changeover there it was again in the dirty bag.
In 2021 I stopped putting it in the rag bin and started taking it home. It is in a carrier bag in my garage now with, I think, forty of them.
They are all the same pillowcase. Same flowers, same hem, same slightly grey white. I have laid nine of them out on a table and they are indistinguishable, and I have looked for the kind of differences there would be if they were forty old pillowcases from the same set, and there are none, and that is worse.
The counting has to be set out exactly, because it is what rules out the ordinary answer.
The ordinary answer is that the house has a pillowcase of its own in a cupboard and a guest uses it and it joins our bag. That is completely normal and it happens a few times a season across the other forty properties, and it looks like this: a strange item appears once, I ring the owner, the owner says oh that is mine, and it goes in their cupboard and the problem is over.
The owner of number eleven is a man in his forties who bought it as an investment in 2019 and has never spent a night in it. There is no cupboard with his family's linen in it. I cleaned the house before it was first let and there was nothing in it but a hoover and a folder.
And it is every changeover. Forty eight, fifty times a year. We do not miss one.
Things that have been tried, one by one.
Two people counting. Standard practice for us now and it was because of this. Two people count into the van, two count out. Twenty eight in, twenty nine out.
Counting inside the house. We started stripping and counting in the bedroom rather than bagging and counting at the van. Twenty nine in the bedroom.
Counting piece by piece as we strip a bed. This is the one that I think about. A double bed at number eleven has two pillows with two pillowcases on it. In the front bedroom, seven times, we have taken the pillowcases off two pillows and had three pillowcases in our hands.
Not one on top of another. I have asked and I have done it myself. You pull it off one pillow, you put it in the bag, you pull it off the other, and there is one left on the bed.
The laundry.
I changed laundries in 2022, partly for price and partly because I had started to wonder whether somebody there was short and making it up from our bag. The new laundry's first invoice for number eleven was twenty nine items.
I asked the manager, a straightforward woman who has been in that trade thirty years, whether it was possible for an item to get into a bag at their end. She said yes, of course, it happens, and that is why they count. Then she went and looked at the sorting footage for that morning, because they have cameras over the sorting tables for exactly this sort of argument, and rang me back and said the bag came off the van with twenty nine in it.
The bedroom.
Number eleven is a 1930s semi and the front bedroom has a fitted cupboard in the chimney breast alcove, which is painted shut. It was painted shut before the house was bought, and the survey mentions it, and the owner has never opened it because the decorator he used said it would take the plaster with it.
I have stood in that room on a changeover with three pillowcases in my hands more times than I am comfortable with, and what I have never done is touch that cupboard, and I will tell you exactly why.
The first year I worked that house, before any of this, I noticed that the paint on the cupboard door was different from the paint on the frame. Not a different colour. A different number of coats. The frame has been painted over and over, the way a hundred year old frame is, and the door has one coat on bare wood.
It is not a cupboard that was painted shut. It is a cupboard that was made and fitted shut, by somebody, at some point, and then painted once.
I still do the house. It is eleven minutes from two others and it pays.
What I have done is change the card in the van. It says twenty eight out, twenty nine back, and the girls know, and the one who asked me why got told that the owner's mother's linen turns up in the wash, which is a lie that is easy to say and that she accepted and forgot.
And when I get home I put the pillowcase in the carrier bag in the garage, and I have worked out that at some point I am going to have to decide what to do with forty one pillowcases, and I have decided that whatever it is, it is not burning them, and I could not tell you where that came from.