I work in a coffee shop in Gilroy. All of us make espresso
drinks, blend cold drinks, greet customers and clean various parts
of the store.
I work in a coffee shop in Gilroy. All of us make espresso drinks, blend cold drinks, greet customers and clean various parts of the store.
That includes the bathrooms.
The other day I was checking the supplies in the women’s bathroom and I noticed something had splattered on the wall next to the toilet.
Just as you are probably doing, I thought “eeeuwww, YUCK.”
Don’t worry, this isn’t so much gross as it is weird.
As I wiped it off the wall and the side of the toilet, I realized with relief it was a food product, maybe one of our strawberry drinks.
Still kind of gross and strange and I was glad I was wearing rubber gloves.
As I kept cleaning, I discovered the source of the splatter: somebody had, deliberately and with great care, twisted the end of a plastic packet of take-out hot sauce and wedged it under the toilet seat so that when pressed, it created the mess on the wall.
Why would somebody do such a thing?
One of the other workers had never encountered this before and agreed it was strange.
Another young woman knew kids in high school who used to twist and pop these packets, but on the ground, not under a toilet seat.
The mess caused me some extra work and turned my quick swish and swipe into a longer project.
Cleaning it up brought back a memory I’m not very proud of.
Forty years ago I was a freshman in college.
Back then, girls lived in girls’ dorms, and a lot was done for us. We got three meals a day. Linens were provided and exchanged every week. The corridors, shared bathrooms and toilets were cleaned daily.
Our cleaning woman was a small Japanese-American woman who spoke broken English. I never knew her real name. With youthful cruelty, we nicknamed her “Makitmoiji” because she explained to some of us how her methods would “make it more easy.”
Growing up, I had kept my own room fairly clean. My mom assigned me weekly vacuuming and bathroom cleaning and I did these chores mechanically. But I had no real appreciation for the amount of work involved in keeping other peoples’ spaces clean.
One weekend afternoon, a bunch of us in the dorm, propelled by a combination of boredom, pent up energy and I-forget-what to celebrate, ran up and down the hall blasting each other, the walls, floors and doors with shaving cream. (Silly String hadn’t been invented yet).
It looked like a blizzard had blown through.
Our cleaning woman reappeared and burst into angry, tired tears.
Her day’s work would have to be done over.
I remember that we realized we had been thoughtless, but I doubt we offered to help.
Now that I’m the one cleaning up after others, I try to remember to be grateful to others who do the work: the people who tend our food while it’s growing, who drive the trucks to bring it to us, who work in the shops where we buy it, who keep the books that keep the businesses running.
Santa gets the credit, while the elves do all the work.
Let’s be kind to the elves.
