My first day cleaning toilets

I am currently on my gap year and for the past month or so I have been searching for a job. When I realised that I wasn't going to get to the top by simply being incredibly awesome, I started looking for jobs the old-fashioned way and sent off a billion CVs to whatever job that kinda, maybe, sometimes floated my boat.

Looking for jobs is hard. It's exhausting. It's almost as hard as studying except you don't ever know what the result will be even if you're putting your all into it. But anyway, after all my effort, one finally came through. An agency found me a cleaning job and now I get dollar by cleaning the lav at a local primary school. Lush. 

Honestly though, I am actually very grateful for this job. Nothing else was coming up and the hours are a perfect 12 'til 4pm, so quite frankly there is nothing for me to complain about. I may be cleaning toilets but at least I'm not destitute.  

On Friday afternoon I walked up to the looming secondary school which stands in front of the primary school for all to see with it's great glass windows and blue paneled walls. I trotted in bowled over by the sheer enormity of the building, not really knowing what work awaited me. All I knew about the job was that I would be making things clean for 4 hours, 5 days a week for 2 weeks. 

The secondary school was like a futuristic Hogwats. There were 3 levels of suspended metal corridors and winding staircases placed around various circular room-pods that kept going up and up and up. Everything was super colourful and there were loads of motivational signs like

JK but that woulda been kewl

Anyway, so the boss lady met me. Her name was Susan*. She introduced me to some of her fellow cleaner ladies. They were pretty awesome - like a lovely little community of middle-aged women who cheerfully clean and complain together about all the mess the 'little darlings' make (cleaners' speak for children). Susan paired me with a chatty lady called Tina, whose apprentice I would be for the day, and then popped us over to the primary school building to get started.

What a primary school. It was like walking into IKEA: white wiggly walls and sleek floorboards. There were multi-coloured seats, shelves and tables everywhere and in the central corridor part of the ceiling was held up by a massive metal green stalk. It was something else. Not like the old, musty C of E primary school that I went to once upon a time with a scratched assembly floor and weirdly patterned curtains to divide classrooms. None of that. They had gone all out here.  

For the first three hours of my shift I weaved in and out of lines of small children, trying to keep up with Tina and her trolley as she toured me around the school, showing me the ropes. We emptied bins, cleaned loos, wiped down sinks and mirrors - oh, and we mopped up a lot stray wee. Kids, particularly boys, don't seem to realise that their pee belongs in the toilet pan and not on the seat or the floor. Tina's face was literally like this every time we found misdirected wee

One of my favourite things we did that day was go upstairs in the lift. When you select which floor you wish to go to, a woman with a Hispanic accent announces where you are going and when the doors are opening and closing. It's brilliant. In fact, it so brilliant that I might even consider it a perk and a reason to come back to work.

After 3 hours of work, Tina and I had a little break. I stood with her in the cleaning cupboard munching on a beautiful, long-awaited wrap that I had made for the lunch break that I found out doesn't exist. Tina had been good fun to walk around with but after our break, it was time to part ways. I was to go it alone for my last hour. 

It wasn't so bad. Even though I was still hungry and my hands were as dry as the Atacama desert due to overusing hand sanitizer, I mopped those floors and scrubbed those loos to shining perfection. It was a bit awkward trying to get round the premises with the trolley as I still hadn't quite mastered pushing it around without splashing water all over the place, but I got by.

All in all, it was a pretty good day. I learned some stuff about toilets, the staff at the school were really nice and the primary school headteacher even gave a warm welcome. As I go into my first full week of toilet cleaning, I will hold this dear phrase to heart:

*all names are changed so I don't lose my job for breaching rules about privacy and stuff