I’m The Poor SOB Who Has To Clean Up All The WAP

I’ve got the bucket and the mop, but no idea what do with all this WAP.

Sam Hurley
Slackjaw
3 min readOct 7, 2020

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Photo by Oliver Hale on Unsplash

I’ve got the bucket and the mop, but no clear instructions as to how to properly clean up all this WAP. I take immense pride in my job as a custodian. As a matter of fact, I’m sort of a legend in my field. No matter how wet or gushy, icky or sticky, red or white wine stain — I can handle it, but never in my life have I faced something like WAP.

My heart dropped the first time I laid eyes on the WAP: I knew this would be my career-defining moment. This was no soap and water job. I was going to give everything I got for this WAP.

Firstly, I took to the internet. There are some great custodial forums online that will change the way you look at a mustard stain. Googling WAP, however, made me wanna gag, wanna choke. It didn’t lead to any custodial forums, it just led to me having to spend an hour deleting my browser history. Nevertheless, I persisted.

I don’t cook, but I clean. It’s in my blood. I learned from my grandmother, so I approached the WAP the same way she would: big ol’ bottle of bleach and a used toothbrush. But the WAP remained! I altered my tactics, lost a lot of good Swiffer Wet Jets in the process. The WAP wasn’t going to go down without a fight, but neither was I. I took a chance on the one tip I could find on the internet when it comes to a WAP: macaroni in a pot. That turned out disastrous, and now I have an ant problem, too.

There’s no way in God’s clean, green Earth I was going to let this WAP get the best of me. I fell to my knees and cried out to the WAP to reason with me. This, I swear, is one hundred percent true: for an instant, there was no time or space, just me and the WAP. Then, it all made perfect sense to me. I can only imagine that Michelangelo probably felt this way before he sculpted David.

I put down the bucket, the mop, the macaroni in a pot, and instead I put down my own WAP. The WAP has been in me, in all of us this whole time. It’s not about cleaning up the WAPs, but the WAPs we made along the way.

Anyway, even though my soul and the universe were at peace, this only exacerbated the mess and now the building has been condemned, so I really need this new job. Even though I’m a certified freak, I am willing to work seven days a week.

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Sam Hurley
Slackjaw

New York City based/Maine raised comedy writer. Probably 3 weiner dogs in a human suit