Columnist Susan Snyder: Competitors can really clean house

Friday, June 20, 2003 | 9:08 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

Cassandra Trujillo was nervous.

The bleachers around her were packed by a crowd that whooped, waved pompoms and beat drums.

The pounding beat of "Funkytown" blared from the Las Vegas Convention Center exhibition hall speakers.

And Trujillo waited anxiously for her contest to begin.

She'd never made a bed in front of so many people. But she figured she had enough practice.

"You make so many of them in a day," said the 32-year-old housekeeper at Green Valley Ranch Station Casino.

Trujillo was among housekeepers from 22 hotels who vied for medals in the hospitality competition hosted Wednesday during the Las Vegas International Hotel & Restaurant Show.

Contest officials this week said Trujillo and her partner, Darlene Miller, 40, were two of the tournament's favorites.

"We signed up for multi events. We're gung-ho," Trujillo said.

Each competed solo in the bed-making and vacuum relays. They paired up for the buffer-pad toss, in which a blindfolded participant tosses floor-buffer pads and his or her teammate tries to catch them on a plunger handle. They sat on the bench for the Johnny Mop (toilet brush) toss. All events were timed and also judged on quality and finesse.

And yes, they practiced.

"We worked to finish early a couple of days, to see what it was like," Trujillo said. "We actually practiced all of the events because when you're in a contest what your brain wants to do is sometimes different from what your fingers want to do."

Trujillo's fingers wanted to make a bed fast. She won her heat with a time of 1:58. That's quick, but not quick enough to win the medal.

Still, you try it.

No fitted sheet. No mattress showing. Hospital corners. Bottom sheet tucked. Top sheet untucked and folded over the top of the blanket. Pillows stuffed in cases with the flaps tucked neatly inside and properly placed, open ends to the center.

"There's a whole lot to it," Chris Snow, Bally's operations director, said as he cheered from the sidelines. "The hard part is when it's up against a wall or a headboard. And they go as fast as this in the rooms."

Three years ago the contest attracted fewer than 100 competitors who showed up in their uniforms. This year more than 200 arrived with team shirts, banners, foam fingers and rooting sections.

Miller, who finished first in her bed-making heat, competed for Green Valley Ranch last year. She felt she had a sure-fire strategy for the buffer toss.

"You synchronize in your mind where she's standing so you can remember it when you're blindfolded," Miller said.

Alas, her tosses came up a little short. But both women cleaned up in their vacuum relay heats. They had to unwind the cord, plug in the machine, suck two cups of confetti from a carpet, unplug and rewind.

In the end, neither Trujillo nor Miller won a medal. But the Green Valley Ranch teammates, like others who competed, had shown themselves to be good sports at work earlier Wednesday.

"We all pulled together to finish early so we could be here," Trujillo said.