85% of the time my job is easy. I’ve been at my janitor job 5 years so I usually know what to expect and I usually know how to do the work OK. Or at least I do a passable job because I suffer from fatigue.This past Monday I went to work on about 6 hours of sleep which is typical of me. I rarely get 8 hours of sleep on workdays and I go in last Monday and I punch in and the co-supervisor tells me, “You’re going home tired after work today” and he laughed.
I suspected we had to clean carpets which I dislike. But it turned out we were washing windows in the office building we work in. We usually have it done by professionals once a year but this is the first time we are doing it ourselves.
It sucks because it’s a two story building and there’s at least a hundred windows counting the upstairs and downstairs. And it’s not just our building, we have do do three other buildings! So my supervisors trained us on this window-washing machine, basically I little contraption filled with water with a hose attached to it and then we use 20 plastic poles that have a brush and squirt water through. It’s not easy, it’s a little tricky.
It was the first time the four of us used one and you have to learn a good technique and we took turns and when your turns come we have to wield this pole and have the rest of the guys behind you watching you doing it. You want to do a good job and you don’t want to look bad in front of everybody. It was tricky and awkward.
But here’s the thing: we did about twenty windows which took 3 hours because we were all just learning the right way to do it. It’s hard because it’s awkward and you don’t want to break the equipment. But the supervisor above my regular supervisor came out and watched us cleaning for awhile and then tried it himself and then he told my supervisor that the machine needed a new filter so we had to stop until 3 weeks from now. But the worst part is that he told us we have to start at the beginning and do all the windows we already did, all over again.
