The Ryno Pen

I ain’t dead yet. In an effort to keep a positive focus, here’s what might pass for a funny post if your humble blogonaut wasn’t such a tedious pedant. So, put on your best boredom-proof galoshes and grab a Davy lamp: we’re going in.


I used to moonlight as a cleaner. There’s an earlier installment of the adventures here.

The Large Secure Place where I plied my trade had, by my estimation, something over a hundred crappenhousen, each with its three or four stalls. It must have been a prestige thing, or some sort of hazing, that I got allocated the Bogs (or half of them anyway). I didn’t mind, because it meant working alone, to my own pace. It’s surprising how quickly you can get a routine thing done if you plan well, and go at it steadily.

When I was still relatively new to the game, there was a lot to be learned. It wasn’t about the application of the Nifty Little Scrub-Brush or which toxic chemicals to use where, but about the people.

We were, like all cleaning-cloths, a motley collection of torn, faded and worn-out articles. Some were actual salt-of-the-earth fulltime cleaners, and others were pulling double duty for various reasons. Of course I couldn’t verify any details, and these tales are mostly inventions anyway.

According to rumour, there were a few military types among us, and one of the leading-hands failed to avoid calling the corridor-polisher in his area “Sir” every so often.

There was a fairly senior office-type, and the SP was that cleaning was part of a crazy spin cycle that involved “Weight Loss -> exercise -> strenuous second job -> lack of energy -> lines of speed -> helped with listlessness AND weight loss -> cost a lot -> made second job a necessity” or something similar.

A pair of Continental chappies came from the same municipal office day job. The older one could be seen during his nine-to-five wearing RSI arm splints and morosely handing customers printed permits and certificates from a LaserJet, being ostensibly unfit for owt else. The older bloke appears again in this adventure, so his character needs a name: how about “Diego Malingra”?

Then, too, there were the ghosts. These were people who only existed notionally: that is, their pay was drawn, but might well have been split between the site supervisor, the leading-hands, and a kickback to the cleaning inspector, if rumours were correct. The result was that the actual workers got pushed just that little bit harder, and some skimping happened.

There were no relief staff to spare. Those slots were probably being filled by Casper and his buddies. Thus it was I landed a week where the whole Realm Of Bogs was mine, all mine, hahahahahaha.

Okay, not so funny in reality. For a start, the western end was where the Continental chappies worked. They’d been trying to prime me with tales about the alleged ghost (scary apparition as opposed to payroll phantom) of Floor 5. I yeah-yeah’ed and kept going: the old Diego was difficult to understand, and I’m sure he talked utter shite in his native tongue too.

While I could manage my usual fifty or sixty in a shift, the extra corridor travel made for a tall order. The only way I’d even finish, let alone grab time for a smoke, was if I could be sure of using the lifts.

For my US readers: lifts = elevators.

Old Diego Malingra had a funny little habit. He was fond of “parking” the lift on his floor with a sharpened matchstick. Good for him, but lousy for me, since the way the lift controls worked, his open lift was first-to-go (and wasn’t going, due to the Bryant and May Reservation System). To put it plainly, “No Lift For You, Fella”.

I had to visit every floor. He had to go from Five to Four, and later to Ground, where he’d empty his cart (and hide a complete PC in the skip for later, perhaps… somebody did!) and hide behind the skip smoking. So, while he was smoking, I had to go down seven floors, steal back the lift, and lose a lot of time. Then I had to do it from Six to Ground, and so on ad pissed-off-eam.

Eventually, I pinned the lift. The little fella was ropable. He came up to Fourth and started waving those magical hands of his, now bereft of their RSI braces thanks to the magic of moonlight(ing).

“What you do, play silly game, you can’t!” (For the benefit of US readers, the word “can’t” is pronounced “CAR-nt”. It may not have been the word our little friend intended to use in this context.)

I said, very calmly, that he shouldn’t park the lift, so I could work too.

“Hey, you think you funny. You go get a fork!” (That is precisely what he said/sputtered.)

But it wasn’t a fork at all. The little chap had reverted a little too deeply to his Continental stereotype, and was waving at me a collapsible dagger, as small and nasty as its owner.

Fear sometimes lends extraordinary powers of muscular coordination to otherwise-slightly-dyspraxic little me. Having nowhere else to go, and no witnesses within high-pitched shrieking distance, I kicked.

Luckily, I got his hand a good, high kick and the little blade went skittering. (Gee, he couldn’t exactly claim a knackered hand under compo at his day gig, either, I thought fleetingly.)

“That’s not a fork, you fuckwit! Get some table manners.” I walked off. Well, actually I fled as slowly as I could, to avoid exciting the mad bastard to pursuit.

I was perhaps a bit jittery for the rest of the week. It was bloody obvious something was going down on Friday: the security guards were just coincidentally discussing the ghost a little too loudly and in a manner much too wooden, in my hearing.

The lights being out on Five was nothing new. One learns to be ready for the unexpected: often it turned out to be a security guard with his boots on an executive-level desk, dining on office-staff cookies while phoning his brother in South Africa. (Communications security/ logging was as nothing in those halcyon days, and a 50-ohm resistor in the appropriate place on the panel gave my day-job phone some awesome-if-unauthorised privileges, too.)

Makes mental note to tell about the guards at a later stage: they deserve a post of their own.

I slowed my cart to lessen the noise. There was no moonlight, but with a little sideways movement and a distant Exit indicator, I could see something by parallax.

It swooped. I ducked and swung my mop.

Connected! 

Diego howled and ran.

“Boo!” I said.

I worked there for a while longer, but luck was with me and I kept to the eastern end, where the main danger was Typist Supervisors with amazing nanoscale vision.

And a couple of times a year I’d have to go into a certain office to renew some necessary licences and permits. Of course I’d need my stickers and certificates.

For some reason the old bugger with the arm-splints would go pale, like he’d seen a ghost.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Humour, crazy people, humor, memories, people stuff, people-watching, 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.