The Ryno Pen

I’m piggybacking on the talented and much-more-famous Mr Angry for inspiration with this entry, but his post on clean-freaks in his excellent blog put me in mind of another time, another place.

Tech toys cost a lot, especially when they’re new, imported tech toys, and there were shiny things with blinky LEDs your humble blogonaut just had to have.

The day gig wasn’t a brilliant payer, but it came with a card that allowed, shall we say, “access to certain areas”. In the days before Big Brother could put surveillance and cross-indexing on anything he chose to waggle a puppet in a burnoose at, there were things a bloke with the right access could do. Nope, I didn’t sell out to a foreign power: I went on the scrub!

When work at Place A finished for the day, off came the collar and tie. An hour later, at Place B across town, a vaguely familiar figure, clad in a set of grubbies, passed the guard, signed on and began earning an honest buck.

“Cleaner!” came my warning as yet another bathroom was entered.

Yeah, cleaner than this lot, anyway was my inevitable-but-unspoken response.

Some women in uniform must have been finding the struggle for equality tough, back in those dinosaur days. A small enclave of people-with-epaulettes occupied one of my floors, and the girly ones made for the consistently-worst area of my night.

Rather than squick both my genteel readers, let me just say that the walnut-sized lump of dung left as a “Did You Do The Place Thoroughly” trap could only have gotten into that awkward spot behind the handbasin outflow pipe by careful manual handling. As far as the “Throw Certain Items On Ceiling And Leave Stuck” game, well, let’s just say the male personnel were not plausible suspects.

Human frailty being what it is, I’ll spare you the sordid details of reading material, writings, strange findings like (close to Christmas Party season) The Four-Seat Bathroom, Totally  Six Inches Deep In Ice, and other curiosities.

Let me digress for just one little excursion into the realm of Forensic Scrubbery. Just like the CSI chappies on TV, your cleaner and your laundry person know absolute shitloads about you.  (The pun may have been a Freudian slip.) There was one particular female bathroom where the paper towel waste gave a little clunk noise every night.

Curiosity got the better of me. It turns out that the clunk was due to a small bottle, which had previously held brandy, hidden in the towel waste. That’s one 375 ml (13 fluid ounces in UK measure) bottle of the hard stuff a day. Something had to give.

There came a night when there was more to that particular Little Girls’ Room than Hairy Cleaner And The Flask Of Concealment (not copyrighted by J K Rollling -in-it). It was the far darker sequel: Hairy Cleaner And The Chunder Of Inapproachability.

Ms Sly-Drinker had finally lost her malty Weetbix breakfast cereal. Heyy, remember, I was the NIGHT cleaner. It must have been a bad day for the staff: I know I had to dive out for air a couple of times before the job was finished. {(Weetbix + Brandy) x 1 return trip to the digestive tract} = Very Gah.

Later that week, one of my contacts at the complex told me about a mailroom delivery lady who had taken an electric mail cart straight out of the lifts at full tilt and completely destroyed a single panel of toughened glass over ten feet tall and about twice that in width. Apparently she reeked of the demon drink.

While Sherlock Mop has no conclusive evidence, the bogs in question were close to the mail room. Furthermore, m’lud, the prosecution wishes to point out that the bottles stopped appearing that very day.

Anyway, to the point… there were typists in the earth in those days, and word-processors were still a rarity. Typing pools were havens of girly weirdness, and typist supervisors were sometimes idiosyncratically despotic in ways only imagined by students of Mongol history.

One such fearsome old biddy lay in wait for me one evening, despite my time in her domain happening about three hours after she should have been back in the belfry or wherever. The Queen Typist accosted me in the corridor: she was on a mission, and had something to show me. I had Been Remiss.

In keeping with the stroke of award-winning genius that had seen the large complex built directly on a local fault line, the bogs were all tastefully lined with inch-square tiles in a sort of variegated poop-brown, separated by grout coloured the exact Neglect Grey of an aged drunkard’s remaining teeth.

It was into a Ladies’ version of one of these, that she now propelled me, gripping my elbow in a 100WPM pincers-of-steel.

“Look at that!” She hissed dramatically, jabbing with her free hand at a spot of the aforementioned grotty grey grout.

I could see no difference between the indicated trouble spot and any other square centimeter on any of the walls in the couple of hundred stalls and basins in the complex.

“Could you tell me what I’m looking for?”

“That, young man, is HEPATITIS!” She drew herself to her full boofy-haired height and looked at me over lavender plastic rims.

“Miss, with all due respect, you’re wasting your time here.”

“What DO you MEAN?!?!?!?” (You bet it was shrill!)

“There’s blokes squinting through microscopes down the road in CSIRO would give good money for you to do that.”

I walked off, wasn’t reported, and never saw the old biddy again.

Shithouses happen.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 11:48 pm and is filed under crazy people, memories, people stuff, people-watching, rant, service industry, workplace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.