HUNT: Cleaning her way to national recognition

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Nancy Pedersen gets up at 4:30 every morning and the first thing she does is make her bed. Then she goes to work and checks on as many as 50 others.

“We have duvets … if they’re bunched, I just can’t handle that,” she said. “I have to fix it. It just doesn’t look right.”

Pedersen is the executive housekeeper at the Crowne Plaza Lord Beaverbrook Hotel in downtown Fredericton. She’s worked there for 52 years, arriving every day between 6:15 and 6:30 a.m.

Next week, the soft-spoken 68-year-old Fredericton native will get on a plane for the first time in her life and travel to the nation’s capital for the Canadian Tourism Awards gala at Ottawa’s Westin Hotel.

She’s a finalist for the employee of the year award. And if you ask Crowne Plaza general manager Trevor Morgan, she’s a cinch to win.

Pedersen leads a staff of between 25 and 30 room attendants. It’s a demanding job, “but it’s one she continues to do without complaint.” he said.

She’s been doing it since March 2, 1972, according to the plaque above the staff cafeteria, which  was named in her honour six months ago at Morgan’s insistence.

Downtown with her sister, she dropped in to the hotel and filled out a job application. She was hired before she got home, and started the next day.

“I didn’t even have an interview,” she said.

The job entails “a little bit of everything,” she said, from payroll and scheduling to preparing room attendants for the day and checking rooms. There are 168 rooms in the hotel and anywhere from 20 to 50 per day must be cleaned on checkout.

The job has its perks. She got close enough to Queen Elizabeth II on a royal visit to see her as she stood on a balcony above the lobby. She was introduced to the king and queen of Jordan, and met most of the actors who made up the cast of Copperhead, a movie shot at Kings Landing in 2013.

If she’s had a bad day, she can’t recall it.

“We have ups and downs, but we have more ups than downs,” she said.

“I love my job. I love the people. I love my team. I don’t know what else to say.”

So her acceptance speech will be short and sweet, apparently.

“I can talk to my team all day long. To get up in front of people … I’m very nervous. I’ve been that way all my life.”

Humble to a fault, she doesn’t believe she’ll need an acceptance speech.

“I have to be honest … I don’t think I’m going to win,” she said.

She has lofty standards of cleanliness for each of the rooms. That applies to the rooms in the home she shares with Danny, her husband of 48 years. Her home, she said “is nice and clean … I think it is.”

Retirement is not on her radar.

“I’m not ready,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to it.”