gemsybobsy | Entries tagged with cleaning

Well, I am busy. To the point of having 'DO NOTHING' actually written in my diary on a couple of Saturdays. Normally being busy means lots of writing in this here journal, but I'm not really that into it at the moment. I feel quite boring; all I can think to write is lists. I need some memes or something to get back into the habit of writing properly, or summink.

This is what I've been doing, anyway:

NOTHING.
Cleaning. So much cleaning, in fact, that my fingers have started to stick down and I have had to go and buy a shiatsu cushion. Which is amazing, but still...
Skiving ballet, and going to ballet, depending on how much cleaning was or wasn't required that week...
Walking naughty, naughty dogs. *glares at Alfie*
Went out for a lovely meal on Fathers' Day with both my 'dads', and Dhana and Stevie's dad, which was absolutely lovely. Love how my lovely family are able to always be lovely to each other.

MOTing the Hundwagen, replacing the smashed-in rear light, getting a new lambda sensor and mirror and, most importantly, novelty stickers for the rear window. Have since somehow smashed in the rear light again.
Some cooking! I made scones and pizza from scratch, and it was all much appreciated.

Dubbin' in Dorset, with both of my nieces and their mum and dad, plus my dad, and some mates. We sat around in tents and barbequed and drank beer and looked at Volkswagens of all shapes and sizes.

Headlined two venues with Dreams Divide in one weekend! *cough*BUYTHEALBUM*cough*

Discovered the best sweet shop ever in Salisbury, and now I really want to move there. To the actual sweet shop.
Saw Combichrist at the Talking Heads, which was splendid.
Went shopping in town with Tam and Steve, larked about a lot; ended up in the pub drinking too much while talking about diets.
Hanging out with Steve a lot, watching lots of TV and stuff, and Sarah came over for a spot of Torchwood one night too.

Coming up:

Sonisphere this weekend! I must pack.
A couple of cinema trips (Third Star and Harry) and a Dungeon trip on the 16th - Jeannie's got a babysitter!
America! Fuck yeah!
SOUNDGARDEN. IN AMERICA. WITH rhymeswithbooze. OH SHHH-
The continuation of the Dreams Divide July Tour (Southampton & Reading - not headlining this time though).
Stevie's first birthday!
Devin Townsend at the Heads. ACOUSTIC. OMG. I still need to get tickets though.
Nan & Grandad's 50th wedding anniversary. Awww.
Prom 44 at the Albert Hall.
Reading? Depends on money, of course. And ticket availability. I am avoiding looking at Musebay because I know I'll be tempted to use the dreaded credit card (dreadit card?)...
MY TWO BIRTHDAY PARTIES. I am excite. One is going to be at the Bridge, and the other is an invited gatecrash of Chris & Pete's wedding. Hahaha.
A swap party at Sarah's for charideeee.
BIRTHDAY LOLIDAY IN SPAIN OMG I BOOKED THE FLIGHTS YESTERDAY AND I'M SO EXCITE.
More Dreams Divide gigs. One at CyberSonik festival in Camden. :D
And One in Berlin. Lol.

So, enough to be getting on with I think, and more than enough to have to work hard to raise money for *rubs lower back*. I am determined to have 30 birthday parties before next year's planned extreme frugality. Hell yeaaah.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Some film Anna and Jon are watching.

One of the most convenient perks of my job occurs when one leans over the bath in order to clean it, switches on the cold tap and gets chilly water all over one's head and/or back because said water has decided to come out of the shower instead.

CRUEL, CRUEL FATE.

Scanning photos with big project in mind. Yawn.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Black Books again

Done so much stuff! So much stuff is done! I cleaned four houses today, including ours. I did laundry and washed the dogs' stuff and everything. Our toilets needed emptying and descaling, so I did that too. That wasn't the best...

So let's go back to the thrilling subject of my essay of d00m! I would say it is now about 97% complete. I got to the word count and almost wept with excitement and relief. It has a coherent argument and a good structure and this is the last one! I've nearly finished the course! It still needs tweaking and submitting but my goodness I felt so damned accomplished last night, unf. I mentally gave myself a motherlovin' high-five. I really wish I could be that prolific and, well, good at writing all the time. I want to go to bed with that amazing feeling every night. Touch me and feel my awesome, for I've been sooo productive.

I got my chest x-rayed today, a routine asthma check-up. Those things are SO much fun, seriously.

Not a lot else to say; this was just a quick round-up of my day and a note-to-self recording how good I'm feeling at the moment. Oh, and I am being a total LJ whore right now. I'm zooming around leaving comments everywhere, even in communities, and I never do that. Heehee. I want more e-interaction, I guess. Hi, new friends!

(It is kinda scary posting things now, knowing that new people are looking! *waves timidly*)

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: The Devin Townsend Project - Awake! | Powered by Last.fm

1. When you put paper in the bin, please scrunch it up instead of folding it. When emptying bins there is nothing more annoying than sandwich bits flying down an inter-bin 'slide' created by a sheet of paper and ending up down our tops, in our faces or generally somewhere else that involves picking the stuff up off the floor and putting it in the sack.

2. Better still, put paper in the recycling bin your employers have gone to the effort to provide you with.

3. Please also scrunch up your used Post-It notes. We have lots to be getting on with and it's very time-consuming peeling millions of these poxy things off of bin liners.

4. You see those little white plastic brushes situated in neat little holders, right next to every toilet? Consider using them.

5. When a cleaner is using a vacuum cleaner, it's considered impolite to stand on the cable.

6. When a cleaner is obviously about to enter/leave a room, it is only considerate to move somewhere other than right in front of the door to have your conversation with a colleague.

7. We appreciate being spoken to, even if it's just a 'hello' or anything, anything about stuff other than the dust on your desk/the fact that you are disappointed that we occasionally move your footrest.

8. We judge how unhealthy and lazy you must be by the state of your desk, remnants of food in your bin and the crumbs under your desk. Your wife doesn't know you throw away your pasta salad and have a McDonald's for lunch every day, but we do.

9. We secretly like the unhealthy people because at least the crumbs give us something visible to hoover, making our jobs feel more worthwhile. Crisp packets and fizzy drink cans also slide from the bin to the sack with minimum fuss. Healthy people leave herbal teabags and bits of fruit in the bin, which means we have to change the pesky liners. Grrr.

10. We know you think you might be above cleaning up after yourself. Maybe you think, "That's what the cleaners are paid for." Maybe you think, "There's a hundred people in this building and nobody will know it was me!" Think again. We know it's you, and we bitch about you. If we don't know who it is with the disgusting toilet habits/fishy fanny/habit of leaving fluids in the urinal, we simply assume that all of you are disgusting, lazy, selfish, ignorant, disgusting, disgusting pigs.

11. You are not better than us. You work in a call centre. We would love to shout this in your faces, but we're scared you'll throw your university degrees at us.

12. When you leave sweets on the desk, we steal them ~~and lick them and put them back~~.

Current Mood: bitchy
Current Music: a telly show on the telly

I had an emo weekend. I don't think I'm going to go into it. FML.

I did something silly and bought loads of photos of our dogs, and am now really, really up the creek. I have so many things to be paid for soon (a bit of rent, Peugeot, a night out on Friday, one gig, two Germany trips, one Bognor trip and a possible Finland mission) and I currently have just enough weekly income to cover my rent and petrol. Nightmare. So I'm trying to find some sort of casual work to fill two-three days a week, without interrupting my amazing Tuesdays (a ballet-dancey-sorta day) and Thursdays (a £85-for-a-days'-work-sorta day). I already knew this, but jobseeking online is a nightmare! I have been e-mailing my CV to all sorts of casual work agencies. One guy called me back straight away and asked me what sort of license I had - he was looking for HGV drivers. Wat is this I don't even. The internet is bendy. In between all this I had lunch (a massive-baguette-sorta meal in a lovely-new-café-sorta place in Portswood) with Anna (who's off work this week), desperately trying to sell things on

thriftstoreuk and making trips to the tip - we finally got rid of all the rubble, old carpet, fence panels and general crap from our front drive. I also took the boys for a run and sneaked into the village to get Anna a birthday card because I was going to make one like I normally do but I have run out of ideas for good cards these days.

Current Mood: accomplished

Holy crap, it's only just dawned on me how much weight I've actually lost. Six inches off both my waist and hips, five off of each thigh, two off of each of my upper arms and only two inches off my boobicles. My BMI was 29.2, and it's now a healthy 24.5. Get iiin. 2st/28lbs/12.7kg of fat cells are no longer wibbling around my middle.

I still have an appallingly bad diet though. 8 biscuits = breakfast and lunch. I know how to eat properly and when I do it, I feel great. But I'm lazy, and I'm such a sugar addict. I ate an entire tin of Quality Street over Christmas instead of healthy meals. Bad bad bad. I really am naughty and I am going to get horrible diseases. SWEETIES SWEETIES GIMME GIMME.

I'm also happy because tomorrow's Monday and I don't have to do the school cleaning ever again!

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEpj9w1yz64

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Muse - Interlude

Today I said t'ra to 3 things that I will never see again.

My sparkly office. I will miss its shininess. As far as offices go, it wasn't actually that bad to clean! Kind of satisfying. Everything's nice and new and comes up nice, so you feel that cleaning is worthwhile, if you know what I mean. Like, if it was old and grotty no-one would notice if it was clean or not. I would actually love to work there, as an office worker, like. It's so airy and huge and air conditioned and they have free biscuits and fruit and their own desks to do what the hell they want with and laptops and desktop PCs and speakers and flexitime...

My Sheebs. I want her to staaay. She's been here since Monday, and it was love at first sight. I will miss her so much. I can't explain, but I really bonded with her. Like we knew each other in a previous life or something. I was so sad to see her and her cute colleh nose go home.

This is Cadbury (Cads). I've been walking him every other week since the beginning of the year, and he's a lovely old soppy bundle of love. He's moving up North with his family next week so I had to leave my key on his dining room table when I left him today. It took me ten minutes to say goodbye. I'll miss his cuddly bounciness and his speckly white beard.

Awww. I need cheering up now.

Current Mood: sad

AAARGH. Bills to pay all over the shop. I love O2's Indian helpdesk. They forgot to put a requested unlimited web browsing bolt-on on my tariff so I needed £15 back. I e-mailed them at 22:22 tonight and got an agreement to give me said dosh back and a full paragraph in explanation, all within 10 minutes. O2 Online = brilliant and recommended. BT, on the other hand, are shite. I got passed between two different departments SIX TIMES (no lie) yesterday, and all I wanted to do was get a website button to work.

So anyway - Kay came in to work tonight and said that we will now have to work from 5pm-8pm instead of 4pm-7pm because the "cleaner upstairs is disrupting everyone." YES FOLKS, that would be yours truly. Me, the one who puts her headphones in and gets on with it, no messing, quiet as a mouse. I don't stomp around, I don't make a racket... well, my hoover does but it's hardly Motorhead, and I even turn it off if someone's on the phone. I may occasionally whistle quietly to myself when I'm in an empty meeting room, or shake my booty when no-one's looking, but that's it. I don't even speak to anyone. Actually I say only two things out loud - "Hi!" to Rachel the accounts lady who is the only one who ever says hello to me and I say, "Can I just get to your bin, please?" to the ignorant IT twuntflap who always watches me coming yet never gets his legs out of the fucking way so I can reach his bin.

Occasionally when I'm in the canteen an IT guy and I will have a riveting conversation about whether it's alright for him to add his mug to the mammoth pile of mugs stacked up waiting to be washed, but that's about it. And they always initiate it. Oh, and sometimes a guy called Alan who knows my mum will ask how I am. Or someone will say, "Ooh, you've got your headphones in, I can tell!" to which I always want to say, "Oh good, your eyes are working then!"

Other than that, no, you won't hear a peep out of me. So obviously the rustling of my binliners is like nails on a chalkboard, or maybe the swish of my duster is distracting them from their booming-voiced phone calls to Belgium. Oh, and also? "We're going to have to bring in another cleaner to do the window sills and stairwells, so there's no excuse for dust to be left anywhere."

o_O So now my dusting skillz aren't leet enough?

Chris is annoyed about the change of hours, and about not getting home till gone eight - quite rightly. She'll miss Eastenders. Then Kay asked what I thought about it, and I just laughed a little bit and said, "Ummm, whatever, really?" Then I mentioned that I was thinking of leaving anyway. I told her I'd make up my mind tonight, then I got on and finished my work (as noisily as I could). Then I went in to do the toilets, and realised I was being told I was shit at cleaning by people who are incapable of cleaning up their own skidmarks. Sorry to be so graphic, but after seeing the state of one of the toilets today? Last straw. I quit!

... only to be greeted by Reception Bint looking quite chuffed with herself saying, "Kay's here. She's in the kitchen and would like to talk to you." I grumbled the word "cheers" at her and signed in. Kay appeared at the door, I apologised, nothing more was said - up yours Reception Bint - and she told me the reason she was there was because they'd had two complaints:

1. The fridges hadn't been done on Friday,
2. A bit of the reception area had been missed, and was dusty.

Now, as I had in fact done my job properly thankyouverymuch, I indignantly showed Kay my sparkling fridges and nothing more was said. I don't do reception, so it was obviously Chris who'd been 'naughty'. When she turned up, even later than me haha, she was 'told off' (i.e. not really, Chris and Kay just got a cloth and wiped the missed shelf in the fridge). The problem in reception turned out to be a tiny, invisible, dusty ledge. Chris didn't even know it was there.

Now, the receptionists are often there for a good hour after we arrive. Chris chats to them all the fucking time. So instead of politely asking Chris (who works bloody hard) if she wouldn't mind perhaps dusting that poxy little ledge, they complained to Martin the facilities manager, who most likely phoned the GSF head office and bugged Iain, who most likely stopped making his contract tenders (haha, he took over my job) to call Kay, who had to take time out of her fully-packed schedule to come all the way from Portsmouth to our site to sort us out. And it probably messed up her family/dinner arrangements. Knowing Kay she'd probably been working since 4am, and had finally got home. So that's over four people put out because the fucking stuck-up cows couldn't make a simple, quick request to the cleaning lady. Isn't that just pathetic? All I see there is a bunch of precious, holier-than-thou prickpripes yet again trying to get one over on the little people.

My phone rang several times while I was vacuuming, and each time I answered the phone (hands-free). Everyone ignores me anyway so I can get away with it. I stood in the IT section and said as many words like "system" and "error" and "operating system" and "intermanets" and "policy" as I could. Then I picked up a stuffed Linux penguin and was all, "Yeah I'm at work, I better go and stop fondling this Linux penguin."

LOL THE CLEANAR KNOWS WOT LINUX IS.

I would say I don't know why I have this insatiable need to show everyone I'm not just a cleaner. But I do know; it's because I want them to know that people aren't below them in any way just because they're not wearing a tie! Especially that teenager who looked at me all snobbily and snorted when I dropped my hoover. Ugh. Yeah love, when I was your age I did work experience in an office too. Now I'm cleaning up the faeces of two species and ain't got two pennies to rub together.

WOOHOO, there goes my inner chav again!

Current Mood: aggravated

The usual story with office cleaning goes like this. You'll turn up, sign in, stand listlessly in the cleaning cupboard trying to summon the will to do anything while 'chatting' with the 'girls', pick up your black sacks and go grudgingly about your mission, hoovering around the chairs of people with half your experience/qualifications and (probably) intelligence, who look down on you whilst chatting to their mates on their headsets instead of trying to sell double glazing. You'll wipe the tea-stains off of the desks of bitchy office queen bees who'll ask you if you "wouldn't mind ever so much emptying my bin more often, as I have a yoghurt every day and if it isn't emptied every day it can start to smell a bit funny?"

Then you'll have 'operative training'. It's incredibly monotonous. Red cloths for toilets, blue cloths for kitchens/general purpose, green cloths for sinks and showers. Don't wear open-toed shoes. Always put out wet floor signs if you intend to create a wet floor. You'll have to sign a form saying you've been taught how to fold up a cable, how not to plunge your hands into bins, how to bend your legs instead of your back when lifting, how to check for machine wear and tear, why you shouldn't mix chemicals, where the staff register and COSHH data sheets are... I know it all, inside out, because I used to audit this sort of thing. Health and safety, risk assessment, quality assurance.

So yeah, cleaning is shit. Especially when you've come from the management end of it. I even designed/typed the bleedin' application form I had to fill in today.

That said, tonight was actually quite fun. Kay got me started and she knows me so there was none o' that horrible introductory crap. She did say something about doing training tomorrow, and I was hoping she'd just let me sign it all and pretend she'd trained me, but then I remembered that I used to audit her so she'll probably be painfully thorough with it, just to get her own back on me. Haha. So yeah, I get to do my own floor, the 'customers' are leaving as I arrive so I get to work alone which means MINIMAL SMALL TALK* and mp3 player listenage for me, woohoo. I get to help myself to free apples and FREE VIMTO, there's no having to 'liase' with the 'cleaning team'... it's relative bliss, old chaps. The only person I spoke to other than the cleaning team was the security guard, who was not at all annoyingly small-talky. Coincidentally, Tam does that security guard shift sometimes, so on the nights she's there it could be quite lolarious. And it's £75 a week, which will be great - it'll cover my rent and leave me with a £20 monthly MAC fund. Also, my muscles absolutely cane, so it's obviously a good work out and I'll therefore definitely lose some weight doing it. I'll see if I still feel this enthusiastic about it in a coupla weeks, eh.

*Fucking small talk. I curse it because it's predictable, unimaginative and lame. A lady was working late in the office today while I was hoovering and she hadn't spoken to me at all. Then when she left she gave me a smile and a, "Good evening!" Then she came back in. I guessed that she'd forgotten something, and I mumbled under my breath, "I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on!" while she said exactly that in a sing-song voice.

Current Mood: determined

20th April
Today was fucking boring. I spent the whole day chatting on the net. I also did some bidding on eBay for another X Files box set. It’s currently £3.40! And I’m top bidder. ^_^

21st April
Today I got up and played some bass, tidied my room, the lounge and the kitchen, went outside and put Tool on really loud so I could hear it out there. So lush and hazy out there. Hopefully we’ll be able to see the planets tonight!

22nd April
Went out with Steve and Dave.

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gemsybobsy

August 2020

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Page Summary

LISTY LISTY
Naughty showers.
Joy.
12 Tips for Ignorant Office Workers (From your Friendly Evening Cleaner)
GTFO crapola.
Woah.
Wuff.
Saying goodbye...
Woohoo!
So I was ten minutes late to work tonight...
I'm a 'cleaning operative' again.
Boring boring.

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Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

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Tails from the Bark Side

shut up gemmer

Entries tagged with cleaning

LISTY LISTY

Naughty showers.

Joy.

12 Tips for Ignorant Office Workers (From your Friendly Evening Cleaner)

GTFO crapola.

Woah.

Wuff.

Saying goodbye...

Woohoo!

So I was ten minutes late to work tonight...

I'm a 'cleaning operative' again.

Boring boring.