Section · The changeover
Strip, clean, linen, inspection, key — in that order, with a different signature on the last two.
The changeover is the operating heart of this office, so it is written down rather than remembered. One sheet per changeover, five stages on it, a planned duration against each, and a line that has to be signed before the next stage is allowed to start.
The sheet, as the pair carry it
| Stage | Held by | Written down | Min |
|---|---|---|---|
| CO·01 Strip | The pair, together | Bag count, anything left behind, time the room was emptied | 20 |
| CO·02 Clean | The pair, a room apart | Start and finish, any part to order rather than fix | 70 |
| CO·03 Linen | Holder of the store key | Sets out, sets back, unit reference on each tag | 25 |
| CO·04 Inspection | A second person | Every line initialled, meter photograph filed | 20 |
| CO·05 Key release | The office | Time out, who took it, arrival time given | 10 |
The window drawn flat
The dial in the gutter wraps the same figures round a face. Laid flat against the clock they look like this: the five stages land in the first two and a half hours of the window, and what is left is the margin that absorbs an overrun.
The second signature
The inspection is never done by the person who cleaned. That is the single rule the whole sheet hangs from: whoever cleaned a bathroom has already decided it is finished, and the inspection exists precisely to be a second opinion. Any two of the team can be the pair; the inspector has to be the one who was not in the room.
Nor is the key released by whoever is holding the sheet. The sheet goes to the office, the office reads the lines, and the key goes out against a signed page with the time written on it. An unsigned line is not a delay to be chased down the phone — it is a stage that has not happened.
The short changeover
Inside a stay of seven nights or more a linen change runs as its own line: strip and linen only, planned at forty-five minutes, no clean and no key release because nobody is arriving. It is given a start time on the sheet in its own right. The temptation is to slide it into the margin of a full turnaround nearby, and that is exactly how a bed ends up half made.
Where the minutes come from
They are planning figures, not promises, and they are the same figures the calculator on the opening page loads. Durations are reviewed against the overrun lines on the sheets rather than against how a morning felt: if the clean runs over on the same unit three sheets running, the figure for that unit is wrong and it is the figure that changes.