Thirteen Toilets
The Thirteenth Toilet
Cleaning toilets and sinks, taking out massive amounts of trash, stocking, mopping, vacuuming… if I’d have known I’d love a simple office cleaning job so much I’d have spared myself a ton of debt in student loans!
It's a dark and icy night in the little city of Jackson. Streetlights softly carry on for phantom traffic, strangely silent. The sidewalks and buildings are dimly lit but enough to display the vintage architecture of the downtown area. It's a long white-knuckle drive on the freeway for me to get here in the wintertime. I use the bigwigs covered parking when I arrive as there’s nobody here now but me. I make certain I’m alone before I get out of my Jeep and watch my footing on the slippery ground. At the entrance, I place my frozen finger into the fingerprint reader and hope it works; the door clicks letting me know I’m clear to enter.
This is the story of 13 toilets.
I'm forever grateful to this company; they hired me when no one else would. I couldn’t get a job to save my life and that was absolutely not for lack of trying. It was a bleak and agonizing year of unemployment after my boss died suddenly. An occurrence so extraordinary that it simply couldn’t be real. Our paradigm divided like a cell. Life continues on for him and them as usual I pray, but in my new paradigm, the sister cell, is the same life minus him and what he meant to my life.
I lost a perfect job. I worked remotely and could live anywhere. My commute to work involved climbing the stairs in my pajamas and slippers with a cup of coffee in my hand. I was paid extremely well and never had to worry about money. I was always able to help my family when needed, for absolutely anything. Emergencies didn’t scare me and if I had to get on a plane, or bring out my grandchildren, no problem. I had total job security. I knew I had that job until I was ready to retire.
That crushing blow was absolutely not for lack of gratitude or any other such lesson...it was another work of an unrelenting evil that has worked diligently to take me apart over the last four years; a curse.
I clean this old building at night. Oddly, nobody thought I could do this job. They kept saying discouraging things like, “oh I don't know... that’s really hard work.” That baffled me because while I’m little, I am definitely not weak or frail. People who know me know this.
In the beginning when I was hired, I was told to meet the supervisor at the building at 6pm. Here in Michigan in winter, its dark already at that time. I was taking the word of someone I spoke with only via email and phone, meeting in a town I wasn’t too familiar with, at an old building I was to believe held people working during the day. The movie Apartment 407 kept coming to mind. A black truck pulled up and 2 big guys got out! And I had to enter the building with them. I’ve pushed through fear many times in my life and this was one.
But gladly, those fears were unwarranted and I ultimately came to really love the people as I got to know them and share a goal.
I fell completely in love with the building and the job! Cleaning toilets and sinks, taking out massive amounts of trash, stocking, mopping, vacuuming… if I’d have known I’d love a simple office cleaning job so much I’d have spared myself a ton of debt in student loans!
My floor, the first floor, is huge with several offices, 6 coffee stations, 5 bathrooms with 13 toilets, and about 118 built in cubicles set up like a square corn maze. The lights in the entire building are on timers. Periodically, there's a loud clack and the lights immediately shut down. This happens quickly in sections, in a sequence, until they are all out in the building. When this begins, I race through the corridors to beat the darkness; to find the tiny green locator lights and press the buttons back on before I’m completely consumed in darkness, alone, with whatever may lay in wait here in the stale corn maze.
While there is mostly a good energy here in this building, there is an exception in one of the men's restrooms. The stall door swings back and forth with loud squawks the entire time I’m cleaning in there. I can feel the thing standing near me, but to my relief it doesn’t leave that room. It’s bark is bigger than its bite and it just lets me go.
Every wall and hallway in the building is a dull aged white color. A gray-green carpet covers every inch of space except the entryways and bathrooms. The smell of dirt scrapes its way into my sinuses; no amount of vacuuming will ever take it away, even though it appears elegant and clean. I have to keep an apron pocket full of tissues.
I’ve gotten my routine down so well that I can put on my ear buds with an Audible book and work on autopilot; I can get through a whole chapter or two in a night. I can feel my body getting stronger with the work and I’m proud that I’ve learned to manage the maze without missing a single cubicle.
I have 3 hours to finish a night. Finishing the 13th toilet is the home free point in my routine. It levels the climb and it’s all downhill from there. Parking away my vacuum and rinsing my mop bucket are great moments. Hanging my mop and putting away my trash barrel, locking doors and hanging up my keys are even greater.
But the sense of accomplishment and self-worth I feel as I pull out of the parking lot onto the street headed home are the sweetest things. No amount of money is better than that.
