It's not your fault.
It's not your fault.
OK, fuck that. But in the summer of '88--3 days after I'd graduated from HS--I got a job a summer job as a custodian at the company my old man worked for. They had a program where HS grads and college students could get a 3 month job doing the shit that's now farmed out to subs across the land: mailroom, cafeteria, security, janitorial, etc. You pretty much had to be at least a sophomore in college to get the security gig which was the best: highest pay, plenty of OT, get paid to do homework. I didn't start UT until the fall so I was stuck cleaning floors and emptying the trash. Which wasn't so bad, really.
But I came on about 6 weeks before their new, massive campus was opening up just north of Tumbleweed hill. Which was out in the middle of BFE back then. 1.2 million square feet of still under construction R&D space. Our first job? Clean the bathrooms. All 32 sets of them. This is when I discovered that construction workers can apparently piss and shit anywhere, at any height or angle imaginable. They didn't care that the plumbing wasn't working. If there was a urinal, commode, sink or fucking water fountain it was a repository for bodily fluids. Additionally, they liked instructing the foremen they hated the most how they should suck their dicks, fuck their mothers, and eat shit & die in english, spanish and/or spanglish by writing it on the walls...in their own shit. Quite a feat, actually.
I was 18, 6'1 and 165 lbs soaking wet and I couldn't wrap myself in enough Tyvek and gloves. We used every industrial strength cleaning chemical known to man to try and clean that shit. There were 2 or 3 other kids like me, plus a handful of "professional" janitors who were probably about 35 but looked like they were 90 to us. They'd walk into any spot without a fucking bit of PPE on because that would make it harder for them to smoke their cigs.
I spent a solid month scraping, cleaning and washing away shit. On the bright side, I was making $9/hr which was a king's ransom for a HS kid with a fake ID in those days. The place had multiple locker rooms (which we cleaned first and were kept spotless). We'd work 3P - 11P, clean up, and could get from Four Points to Pearls in 15 minutes. 6th Street wasn't much longer of a drive.
In retrospect, that might have been my best job. The shit I dealt with then was a lot more honorable and direct than the corporate bullshit I spent the following 35+ years being covered in.