Frustrated

"Life does not accommodate you; it shatters you.

Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition."

– Florida Scott-Maxwell

Sometimes life things happen that are of no interest to those around you, but are so vitally important that they threaten to take you out at the knees. That's pretty much where I've been the last week or so.

The details are mundane – I clean for a multi-national corporation. The facility where I do the physical labor is managed by a second multi-national corporation. The facility recently hired yet a third multi-national corporation to oversee the management of their facility (which in all actuality isn't even theirs).

I am but a single little sole-proprietor. A woman with a vacuum cleaner, a mop and broom, some buckets and rags. A woman who's house payment and little corner of the American Dream is funded by scrub brushes and wet wipes.

Since Big, Bad, Multi-National Company #3 has come into the picture I haven't been paid. I've submitted bills, jumped through their hoops, found the spare change to buy four million dollars worth of liability insurance and tried to play nice and get along. (By the way, can you even dream up a scenario where a woman with a vacuum cleaner and a bucket can do four million dollars worth of damage??? Neither can I.)

I submitted reams of paperwork and make the requisite phone calls which were never returned. I sent emails asking for confirmations and watched my ever empty inbox. And, since the first of this year, I've also been watching my ever empty mail box for a paycheck that never comes. A paycheck for the month of November. . .last year.

Panic began to set in. My house payment is due.

After a dozen phone calls I found out the problem yesterday. They need a W-9. . .

Since November of last year no one at Big, Bad, Multi-National Corporation #3 could pick up the phone and let me know??

I've been sick with worry and frustrated by the lack of helpful management – all for lack of a W-9. It's no wonder so many small businesses fail. I sometimes feel like I'm smothering beneath so many useless layers.

The whole mess reminds me of Congress. But it makes those idiots in Washington at least come off as well adjusted!

Just A Smile

Looking at this does not make me smile.


The best I can do when I look at my cleaning cart every day is try to remember that it provides the means to my monthly mortgage payment. I don't exactly smile, but I am thankful.

But, today I was reminded how really small things can matter.

As I was pushing my cart through the warehouse one of the shift workers came down the same aisle as me. He was driving a tow motor and stopped beside me. I smiled and said hi and he said, "I've been looking for you! I was afraid I was going to miss seeing you today."

"Why is that?" I asked and his answer gave me pause.

"Because," he said. "Some days you're the only person who ever smiles at me."

Very humble, God moment.

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.