The Final Sweep
As a janitor with over ten years of experience in varied locations, I’ve seen more entitlement and rudeness than I like. One of my longer jobs was two-plus years in a large mall, where my responsibility was a massive first-floor area, which included some assorted extra spaces. Hallways, stairways, an office, and crucially for this story, stores. Or, used to at one point.
See. Cleaning is a job where your customers are both businesses and private people. Just as my customers were the people buying things from the mall and then using the bathrooms, my customers were also the folks working at the office or the stores I cleaned.
And sadly, customers everywhere can be nasty.
I was told to add a toy store to my tasks, one dreary winter. A very basic and quick, half an hour tops gig. Use our floor cleaning machine to essentially Zamboni around their floor, where I could, and then use a mop for the rest. Clean their bathroom, kitchen, and dressing area. No dusting on shelves needed! Easy, right? No.
The manager was a sweetheart and very nice as she showed me around. She was not an issue. A small store with an even tinier backroom and, somehow, an EVEN tinier kitchen and dressing area. The mall I worked at was not built for anyone’s comfort, I assure you. Many stories can be told about just the doorframes.
This one clerk, however, was… Interesting.
I would be doing my job, trying to corral the ever-present avalanche of dust, while this woman, ten or so years my senior, would nitpick everything I did. She made the usual comments about working in cleaning before and how I was doing it all wrong. At that time, I had been a janitor (with actual vocational school-level papers and everything) for over eight years! I was not a spring chicken. It all culminated on the second day of my coming to clean. This woman decided it was completely polite and normal to demand my mop frame and mop, to show me how it’s done.
I had endured her pestering for the first thirty minutes clean earlier that week. I had now also endured another fifteen-plus-minute tirade of how I was doing my job wrong. All the while, customers were shopping around us, giving her looks. I felt exhausted and frustrated. It was as if this woman had no other job to do but follow the janitor around.
To this day, I am not at all sure what her deal was. Autism? Rudeness? Mean Girl energy? I have no idea. She spoke as if to a child, in a condescending manner I know all too well, and I saw red.
I gave her my mop frame. I watched her awkwardly mop around before finishing my tasks (with my mop frame put back on my cart by the clerk) and walking out. I told my manager in no uncertain terms that I was not going back. I would not be treated like a child at thirty-plus years old, with eight years of work experience and education behind me.
My manager took the job instead, doing it on the morning shift. Oddly enough, that cleaning task never got mentioned again. I assume the clerk was too cowed to tell a male manager how to do his job. I never found out, sadly. Funnily enough, I never saw the clerk work after a month or so. I was there for a year more afterwards, never seeing her again. I even bought some products from their store during a sale!
Good riddance.
