Things I’ve Learned Cleaning Up After People
One thing you should know about me is I’m a midnight guy to the bone. At almost every job I’ve ever had, I’ve worked the midnight shift. I’ve flipped burgers, stocked shelves, unloaded trucks and cut plastic all between the hours of 10pm and 7am the next morning. I’m obviously not the only one either. There are many more like me, out there in the middle of the night, burning the midnight oil, as they say. Some do it because, like me, they want to work that shift, and some are in it for that precious shift premium. Although all these graveyard shifts have been very different jobs, the one responsibility they have all had in common is cleaning.
Yes, in those midnight hours are when things are cleaned by humans like me and not magical elves. Once the sun is down, an army of zombified people go out all across America and probably the Western world, into the office buildings, convenience stores, supermarkets, theaters and anywhere else you can think of, armed with brooms, mops, trashcans, and rags to clean up your mess. Chances are at 3am wherever you are, there is someone close by making a trip to a dumpster, wiping down a window or has their face squarely in a toilet. The world is filled with toilets and someone has to clean them.
Most people I’ve met who have never had to clean up a spill in aisle five think of that kind of work as beneath them. Cleaning up after people is for illegal aliens, teenagers, and ex-cons as far as they are concerned. It’s disgusting work and the people who do it should be paid the minimum wage until they get better jobs. Of course, the people that say that kind of thing deserve to have the contents of a public bin emptied onto them in their sleep because they could not be more wrong.
Cleaning, in general, is hard work. Cleaning a place of business is a thankless, back-breaking, uphill enterprise. It takes a superhuman amount of self-discipline to wake up every day and do a job you know will suck and an even larger amount of fortitude to scrub up messes most people would burn their house down to avoid cleaning. It is because of this that cleaning as a job is one of those life experiences I think everyone would be better off as a human being if they had to do it for six months, along with working with the public and living in your car. If everyone had to push a mop around for a time in their life they might learn some valuable lessons that would make their lives and everyone else’s lives infinitely better. But since I seriously doubt I’ll be able to get teenagers to clean any better than their parents and instill in them these morals before they turn into unbearable adults, I’ll try to condense what I’ve learned over the years into a convenient, shareable article.
The first thing that really struck me when I first started cleaning as a job was just how dirty everything is. People and the public places they spend their time are disgusting. I could probably write a whole article describing in detail every gut churning thing I’ve cleaned up in an attempt to cause you to lose your lunch but I’ll spare you. Needless to say, I’ve cleaned up EVERY bodily fluid multiple times, including but not limited to dried tampons off a wall, human feces that spelled out ‘SHIT’ across a different wall, a pile of used condoms off the top of a trash can, an over-flowing diaper also spewed over the top of a different trash can and most recently some chunky mystery meat stuffed into the sink drain of a men's room. But even those extreme cases aside, the filth that accumulates naturally over the course of a day is surprising. Being alive is a messy thing and our environment reflects that. Just like in your life, things get messed up or worn out. That’s entropy and it’s fine. Everything will crumble, falter, break and get gunked up. All you have to do, in life and at the job, is clean it up and get ready for the inevitable next mess.
I say the next mess because there will be another mess to clean. In fact, it will probably be the same mess you’ve already cleaned back again. One of the most frustrating things about cleaning for a living is just how Sisyphean a task it is. If you stick around the place you just cleaned long enough you will literally watch your hard work come undone. Regardless, it has to be done. If you don’t deal with it, the mess will only accumulate and get worse. Nothing goes away on its own. Life takes maintenance. Whether it’s small things like cleaning and laundry or the bigger stuff like doctors appointments and personal relationships, you have to keep on top of it or it quickly falls apart. One spill, if left unattended, ingrains itself into or onto anything it is spilled on and eventually grows mold. Don’t get me wrong, I am a king of procrastination but there just comes a point that you have to do the thing you’re putting off. Even if it’s just gonna get messed up again.
The trick to making this less torturous is to realize the difference between when something has to be clean and when something just has to not be a mess. If you’re working in a hospital and you’re prepping the OR, I imagine things have to be CLEAN, but when working at 7-Eleven, where customers are constantly coming in and walking over your freshly mopped floors, you just have to keep things stocked and the coffee brewing. If someone spills something, mop it up and if the trash is full, take it out. No one is expecting the store to be clean enough to perform open heart surgery in. In real life, sometimes it’s impossible to clean up a mess you’ve made. It’s just too big and would take too long to fix. It happens. It’s at those times that your best bet is to patch it up the best you can and move on. If you linger, other parts of your life will suffer for it. When something happens that is too catastrophic to fix right away or you just don’t have the time, resources or energy to properly clean it up, all you can do make sure it’s not a complete mess and move on. The world does not stop for anyone and some days you just gotta do your best to keep up.
Despite the fact that being alive is a messy business, you’ll find out very quickly if it’s your job to clean that there is not a building on the planet designed with the janitorial staff in mind. Right now, my second job is cleaning a big art house theater on the weekends. It’s a 90-year-old building that seats almost 1,600 people complete with chandeliers, an organ that is from the theaters opening and millions of small crevasses for popcorn and candy to wedge itself into. There are plenty of dark corners where no broom, mop or vacuum can reach. So while it all looks nice and pretty, the place you have to clean, and the world, were not built with you and your task in mind. That doesn’t mean you get to skip cleaning it though. That just means you have to pay attention and learn the landscape if you want to even come close to accomplishing any level of orderly. Just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean the problem or mess isn’t your responsibility. You can’t just leave it for the next person because that next person will always be you. Much like any other problem in life, it’s just a puzzle to be solved.
When it comes down to actually getting the job done, there are many tips and tricks to make it easier on yourself and almost all of them can be applied to life outside the workplace. In fact, one of the first things you learn when cleaning any place bigger than your bedroom is to clean top to bottom. You dust countertops, wipe down windows, etc, until gravity does the work of bringing it all down to the ground. Then all that’s left is to sweep it up and mop. If you do it any other way, you’re going to have to sweep up and mop multiple times. Not everything in life has one best way to do things but there is usually a solid method to start with if you’re looking to tackle a problem. You encounter a problem, find its root cause and work your way through it until you find its source. Find the top and work your way down.
Maintenance should be routine. I can still tell you the order I cleaned things at the convenience store I worked midnights at for seven years and at what time I did each step each night. If you can make a routine out of the upkeep in life, then when extra problems do come along, you’ll have all your bases covered and a method to deal with whatever additional mess has come your way. I’m not saying your routine has to be so rigid that any deviance from it throws your life into disarray, but if you have a baseline for where you should be in a night, then you’ll know just how far behind or ahead you are when those other problems come up. For me, that baseline is my routine.
One thing about cleaning I tell people, that at first seems counterintuitive, is that in order to properly clean, you sometimes have to make a mess. Think back to any time you’ve had to do a deep clean on your house. The first thing you do is grab everything out of your closets and hiding places and throw it into piles. You sweep out all the hidden dirt and dust from under your bed or behind the couch and push it into the open. Then you might dump any soiled dishes into the sink or filthy clothes into baskets. All the once hidden grime in your life is brought into the open and now your place is gonna seem much worse than before you started. After that, you have to dive in and start getting things clean again but you can only truly do that after you bring what was once secreted away out into the open. Then comes the real gross part. Anyone who has ever done any cleaning knows, you’re gonna end up with most of that mess on you. You are at some point going to be elbow deep in grime and gunk that stinks and sticks to your clothes. By the end of a shift, the building may be clean but you will be absolutely covered. But in my experience, that’s the only way to get anything done. You have to dive in unafraid of getting dirty for the sake of the task at hand. The solution to some problems is sometimes buried elbow deep in years of neglect and decomposing garbage and you have to be willing to get in there if you want to move forward.
Cleaning is no different from other jobs in that it affects you outside of work. People who work at a fast food joint often can’t continue to eat at that particular place ever again. They have seen the sausage get made, sometimes literally, and it has turned them off from the whole endeavor. This did not work on me, I still love White Castle, but I digress. Some of these ripples actually end up making you a better person. It only takes one night of scraping and scrubbing just to have some drunk come by like a tornado through your store destroying your hard work to make you more careful and considerate in the future when you’re out in public. It only takes being covered in goo from changing one trash bin full of half-empty cups of soda to make the connection that trash bins aren’t all wormholes to some trash dimension. Whatever you throw away in there an actual human being is going to have to deal with so maybe you’ll look for a sink before chucking a half-full Coke in there (it’s a pet peeve). Basically, doing a tough, thankless job will teach you to be empathetic and thankful for the people who are willing to do the dirty work of keeping the world running. You’ll maybe even realize that the work they do is much more vital than whatever the hell it is hedge fund managers and the like do. With that newfound empathy, your attitudes and, more importantly, your behaviors change, making it easier for those people to get the job done which will make them less stressed and happier, so on and so on, until it snowballs into a kinder world. Or, at the very least, if that’s too utopian for you, no one will think you’re an asshole.
There are definitely some people out there that we all know who, when they make a mess in a public place, think (or even say out loud) that they don’t have to deal with it because that’s someone else’s job. Yes, they are technically correct. There is someone like me whose job it is to clean up whatever someone like them might leave behind. But not only does not give you a free pass to live your filthiest life but also speaks to a larger issue in society. Just because it’s not your job doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help out if you can. Imagine a world where instead of your own convenience as your prime concern, we all made everyone's comfort a priority. If you drop something, just pick it up. It’ll save someone else that much time and effort in their day. It all comes down to looking out for each other even when we don’t have to. If everyone did that maybe the planet wouldn’t feel like such a filthy nightmare existence constantly. Who knows?
Now, that’s not to say that if you slap your tall glass of sugar syrup all over the table and floor that you should insist on “helping” by throwing a few napkins on it, essentially putting a bandaid over a tumor. Sometimes you make a mess that is just too big to handle on your own. It is ok to ask for help from someone who has the proper tools and experience to help you. Just find someone around and fess up to your mess and they will most likely be happy to help. Like I said before, messes are inevitable so there is no need to be embarrassed. It’s much better to seek help than to just sneak away and leave the mess for someone else, even if it is their job. Whether it is a mess you’ve made, a project you need help on or just seeking a better understanding, the best thing to do in some situations is to seek out someone who has trained and who has the proper tools to help. That could be finding the janitor or finding a therapist. You do not have to (and I might as well be saying this in a mirror right now) figure everything out on your own. Find the proper tools and the people who know how to use them. They will be happy to help.
For thirteen years I have spent a lot of my time sifting through the trash disasters people leave behind them. My whole adult working life has been one piss covered bathroom after another. My blood may be part cleaning fluid by the time I die from inhaling too many of their fumes. In the end, though, I think it has made me a more empathetic and kinder person. I’ve become someone who’s not afraid to tackle disaster areas and get elbow deep in the filth if that’s what it’s going to take to make the world better. All the same though, if I see you making a mess, expect a fight.
