Oh look, some art from when I was a janitor. Since my last post was about things I actually missed during my work period… I am actually almost liked being a janitor/maintenance worker. In general, the work wasn’t as horrible as it could have been, except when it was. Like the faculty in charge of the building not backing us up when students would purposefully make messes. I.E. a student would leave trash on the floor, dump ENTIRE cups of soda onto furniture, or pee on the floor for fun. I had just as many problems at the university I worked at as at the Elementary School.
I spent a lot of my free time at work doing art or taking photographs of things that interested me. Some things that were a pain … I had to buy a lot of my own supplies because the stuff that we were given just didn’t always cut it. LA’s Totally Awesome will take wax off a floor and just about anything stick like stickers slapped on surfaces.
Organizing was exhausting because I didn’t have the best spaces available. If you were in the older buildings, you didn’t get shiny new shelves to store things on. You had old wooden shelves barely held up in closets where you’d have to carefully shove your cleaning cart. I got things to hang my personally bought cleaning equipment and my label maker from home would help me keep things organized because oftentimes someone … would go into my closet and take things to use.
When I first started working at the university, I was in a newer building and I was so OCD about everything. I made sure to clean the classrooms meticulously each day so that the next day would be perfect. Clean boards, clean desks, clean floors…
Before I would clean … the rooms would look like this…
After…
There was always something satisfying about making the place look spick and span. Sadly, it got to be a point that I was having meltdowns and panic attacks so badly that I’d lay down in my closet each night and cry so hard. Clean a four-floor building with classrooms, offices, labs, and over eight large bathrooms by yourself in 8 hours? Each day. It was never good enough. And I’m honestly not the type that can just leave their work at work. The passive-aggressive notes from professors who were upset their trash weren’t emptied began to kill my morale. (If I come by the clean your office at 10pm and you eat dinner there at 11pm, your smell food containers won’t get tossed.) I still have a hard time getting off the night schedule.
I really do miss my Tardis though…
I wasn’t the Companion, I was the Doctor
I’ve mostly talked about my time at the university cleaning, but I can say my time at the elementary school was very similar. Be nice to the people who clean up after you. The small things pile up and let me tell you, most places do not pay their staff enough to really care. Janitors are something most places take for granted.
Thanks for stopping by today! I just realized that I’ve got 300 posts up on the website. Well, 301 including today. 64 more days until it’s been a full year of doing this. Holy MOO~!
Atelier Whootique 