I’m kind of sad that my nearly four years as a nighttime office cleaner are soon coming to an end. There’s something incredibly satisfying about manual labour with an immediate, visible result, not to mention that the pay is great – and in how many jobs can you spend your entire shift listening to your iPod? However, there are plenty of things about the job that never fail to piss us off. I’m not just talking about the bizarre and often disgusting things hidden or discarded around a typical office building – if you really want to know what your colleagues are up to when they disappear during lunch break, have a poke around the corners of that supply closet that you think nobody’s been in for years. I’m talking about the things that desk-jockeys do in mere seconds of ignorance or laziness that can take us hours of messy and difficult work to fix. In no particular order -
- Don’t put printer toner loose into a bin. Black toner…black bag…there are limits to what the human eye can discern, and when you’re emptying hundreds or thousands of bins each night there’s no time to stop for a forensic examination. Even if we do know it’s there, there is literally no way to remove a bag full of fine powder without it immediately becoming airborne and settling over half the room, turning your office into a kind of gothic snowglobe with me standing as a very unjolly snowman in the middle. To add insult to injury, because this stuff is basically ink it’s nigh impossible to clean up. If you’ve ever come in one morning to find black smears all over the office surfaces, now you know. Throw out the entire cartridge and get a new one – hey, the company’s paying for it – or empty the toner straight into a bag and seal it.
- Make it obvious what is trash and what is treasure. Not a night goes by when I don’t come across at least one identity crisis: something that looks like trash but is only sitting in vague proximity to a bin. We’re more than happy to get rid of those bulky boxes or bits of office furniture that won’t fit into a regular bin. We’re not in a million years going to risk throwing out some important document or brand new piece of equipment just because somebody wasn’t looking at where on the floor they left it. At the bare minimum, sit bulky trash on top of or half in the bin. Better, grab a sharpie and write “THROW OUT” in big letters on it.
- Don’t pour liquids into your wastepaper bin. Ever noticed a funky sour smell hanging around your desk in the morning? That’s not (just) the stench of cubicle ennui. Unless your office uses industrial strength chemical waste bags in your wastepaper bins, theres a good chance that when you toss your half finished cup of coffee in there it’s going to leak straight through and into the bin itself. Most wastepaper bins will only get wiped out a couple of times a year, so for your sake and ours, use the kitchen bins and pour liquids down the sink.
- No office stapler fights. If you’re sitting in a carpeted office right now, take a look at the floor around you. See those shiny metal things embedded in the carpet? Those are used staples, and getting them out is not easy. If you drop used staples onto the carpet, chances are we won’t be able to vacuum them up. Ever.
- Don’t expect us to be psychic. We spend a lot of time around your office. We know who has terrible BO, who just came back from a trip to Japan and brought a souvenir chocolate for everyone, who has hot friends (every office has that photo) and what each of you regularly eats at your desk (yogurt is enduringly popular). We’re especially familiar with the layout of every item on the floor around your desk, and we rarely miss changes. Despite this, you consistently complain when we fail to notice and empty the new bin you purchased. For the inside of your filing cabinet. Yes, the one inside the vault. We can’t see through walls. If we don’t know about it, it won’t get cleaned.
