Thursday, March 13, 2008

Footprints

I don’t write much about my commercial cleaning business. In fact, I don’t think about it all that much except for when I’m sick and don’t want to go. For the most part, I don’t mind cleaning. It pays well. After all, when you do a job that most other people don’t want to do, you can charge about what you want for it.

There have been a few days that make me question the decision to be a janitor. One particularly memorable day saw me putting on gloves to clean chunky vomit out of a urinal. (How else are you going to get it out of there?) A couple of weeks ago there was the day that someone, whose ass was too big for the toilet seat, shit. The offensive stuff never hit the water and the offending asshole (literally!) left it for me to clean up later.

But, those days are rare. And when Fresh & Clean Professional Cleaning Services enables me to buy a house I think it asks me to complain a little less loudly or at least, not quite so often.

Last night I went into the warehouse after all the official, important people had gone home. I cleaned up the cookie crumbs underneath their desks, the spilled coffee on the countertops, the used Kleenexes out of the trashcans and the fingerprints off all the glass doors. I wiped, vacuumed and mopped every surface. All human smell was sanitized from the restrooms, which were left for the next morning’s onslaught of office staff.

As I worked, I realized that my job in that place is to clear away all the biological signs of life that I can find.

It’s a strange job choice for someone who has felt that her whole life was supposed to be about nurturing people by teaching, preaching or listening.

As I was mopping the break room I was still thinking about what a strange place we sometimes find ourselves in. I had worked my way from one end of the long room to the other, moving backwards so as not to walk on the clean, wet floor. I was just finishing up when one of the hourly warehouse workers strolled across my newly cleaned floor with his big, wet boots. His every step left a huge black footprint across my clean floor as he made his way to the vending machine.

I stood there, leaning on my mop, staring at him. He acted like I wasn’t even there as he took the same route back out to the warehouse.

I looked at his trail out the door and I made a decision. I did not re-mop that floor. I thought about it. I weighed the possibility that I might get into trouble if I didn’t against the fact that, no matter how hard I work or how hard I try, it’s impossible to eliminate the warm, disordered, stinky, chaotic imprint of humanity from that warehouse. Yet, it’s my job to try.

When I left the warehouse last night I walked past the trail of now dried footprints and I smiled.

I’ll take care of them again tonight.

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