femme de menage

One of the quirks that comes with living in the Cuques dorm is the femme de menage, or 'cleaning woman'. There is one for each pavillion. En principe, her job is to clean the bathrooms, kitchens, and hallways. but en fait these are always filthy. The other part of her job is to knock on everyones door once a day to make sure that they are either not in the room, or if they are there, that they are not dead. Apparently a few years ago a student committed suicide here and no one realized it until the body began to smell.
Our femme de menage is fantastic. She is short, wears reading glasses on a chain, teal sweatpants, pink socks with sandals, and a pink cardigan. She also smokes like a chimney. She smokes while hosing down the showers (because they dont get wet enough already?), while checking the rooms, and while sweeping the hall. You can tell where shes swept from the trail of cigarette ash.
I wasnt always such a big fan of the femme de menage. On each floor, there is a common kitchen. One of the big kitchen rule is you must take out your trash when you are dont cooking. Whenever trash is left in the kitchen you can expect to be woken up between 8 and 9 the next morning by the femme de mebage pounding on random doors and shouting 'c'est qui a laissé la poubelle dans la cuisine??' Early october, one of these morning wake up calls got ugly. The femme de menage had heard from several corsican girls on our floor that it was the Americans who had left food and trash all over the kitchen. This was NOT true, in fact we hadnt even cooked on that floor that day, and earlier that weekend i had gone in there and taken out someone elses trash and scrubbed the burner. But the femme de menage was pissed and didnt care to listen to our thickly accented explanations. Instead, she started shouting that it was always the foreigners, always the americans, who made a mess, and that we had better figure out who had done this or she would go to the director of the dorm.
Things have since settled down, and our femme de menage has been incredibly friendly the last few months. Im not sure what changed, though i suspect that it may have to do with the fact that we reported the incident to our program office, who talked to the dorm director, but life has gotten much pleasanter without the angry wake up calls.