Cleaning up the mess...

I work for this retail site. Well, some people would refer to it as a retail site but from what I see every night, I would call it a cross between a frat party and a flea market. My name is Joe and I’m the custodian here.

Lately, things have been messier than usual along the halls of this collection of boxes and random crap. I have had to clean one office while instructed to wear a filter mask for some reason. Another day, someone had spit Oreo cookies all over their cubicle and left it for me to clean up. Who spits out Oreos like an animal?

One of the worst messes this month involved the men’s bathroom. Now, the men’s bathroom is always disgusting because, unlike me, most men never feel the need to flush the toilet. The problem this time was that they didn’t even use the toilets. They just poured their yellow territory markings flow all over the bathroom. Not only that, but they also tracked it on their shoes out of the bathroom and to their respective cubicles. I spent hours trying to get the smell out of the floors. The bathroom always stank so it was a lost cause.

Though the smell of the men’s urine was gross, the smell on the third floor put it to shame. I got off the elevator with my usual arsenal of cleaning supplies only to be accosted with a physical jolt of stank. I don’t know what these people do here sometimes but I actually hired my nephew Billy to come in and clean this floor for me. Poor kid, he lost his sense of smell at the age of 5 when a replica bust of Jim Bowie fell off his folks’ mantel and busted his nose. When someone yells ‘Remember the Alamo’, he still instinctively covers his face and cries.

I also had to clean mushy, generic cereal out of the sinks in every bathroom of the building. Do you know how hard it is to clean mushy cereal out of drain crevices? I guess the staff here just assumes I have all the time in the world to clean up their fun-time messes as they had just continued to wash their hands over the cereal rather than try to clean it themselves.

One of the good things about my job is that sometimes I get computer components for free when the company throws out old parts. I found a great keyboard one night and brought it home to attach to my pc. It works great. I had to give it a real try out as I searched for the cause of hives since I had some weird reaction to something I came in contact with lately. Itches pretty bad man.

Really, the only worker in this building who seems to appreciate what I do is a robot named Mediocrebot. That mechanical beauty actually treats me like a person. This past April, she even made me feel like a part of the team here when she pranked me by filling one of my mop buckets up with water and then precariously perching it atop my supply closet door. When I opened it up, the bucket fell on my head knocking me unconscious for a bit and leaving me drenched. When I woke up she was positioned over me singing a jovial little song about being special because I was pranked. That robot really understands people…