Work Stories: Episode 38: Number One

Previously on Work Stories, I wrote about something sad that happened while I was at work.  It involved death and didn’t really actually involve work.  I wrote about it anyway because I damn well felt like writing about it.  You can’t make me have not written about it.  So neener, neener, neener.

This week, I’ll switch back to a story from when I worked at the hotel that I worked at.  Why am I going back there for another story?  Why not?  I haven’t written about there in a while so I feel like I should.  There were other things that happened there besides what I’ve already written about.  I should share some more of that with you, my readers.  The two of you that there are.

So what I’ve got for this week isn’t much of a story.  In fact, I’m not sure that any of you will appreciate it at all.  You should probably stop reading right now, save yourself a few minutes of reading pointless nonsense, and feel better about your life.  Most of what I am about to write could be summed up in one sentence, and the story wouldn’t be worsened for it at all.  That was the wrong way of phrasing it, since it’s not a story, really.  What I am about to tell you about could easily be over and done with in a paragraph, and it would save us all a lot of time.  But I have made it my mission to give you a page worth of Word Document writing in every post for the Work Stories, so this week will be no different.

I always worked during the day at the hotel.  I either worked the dining room in the morning, the parking lot through the afternoon, or the dining room in the evening.  Once in a while there were times when I’d be dishwasher, but that doesn’t change the hours during which I’d work.  All of my shifts were between 6:30 in the morning and 10:30 at night.  That’s what I would consider to be daytime.

There were three people, I think, that ever worked through the night at the hotel.  These people were the people who would cover the front desk during the night, and the nighttime cleaning guy.  This week’s story involves the nighttime cleaning guy, so let be describe him a little bit.  He was a Chicago Blackhawks fan.  That’s all you need to know, really.  He was nutty like that.  This story does nothing to prove this wrong.

If I worked the evening shift in the dining room or the kitchen at the hotel, I would frequently see him.  He would come in around eight in the evening, and he’d be there until four in the morning.  That’s roughly what I remember, but I haven’t worked there in four years so I could be wrong.  He’d come in and start cleaning things.  The bathrooms would get done.  Any maintenance issues that had arisen since the maintenance crew went home would be taken care of.  If someone needed a cot, he would take it to them.  He was an everything man for most of the night.

One night whilst I was working in the dining room, he arrived and began cleaning the washrooms.  Part of his duties in doing that was to do the disgusting job of replacing the pucks in the urinals.  Those pucks are also known as urinal cakes.  So he walks up to me while I’m taking the dirty dishes to the kitchen for cleaning, and he says something about wanting cake.  I wonder what he’s talking about, and in my stupidity, I ask.  His response is to get me to sniff a urinal cake.  Luckily, the urinal cake was unused.  It would have been even worse if it had been one of the ones that was already in the urinal.  Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up.  Thinking about the used ones, that is.  The one I smelled just smelled like very acidic soap.  I don’t know how better to describe it.

And that’s the story.  I told you it’s not much of a story.  It’s more of a thing that just happened.  It really doesn’t have an ending.  I smelled a urinal cake!  Whoop-de-doo!  I told you that you would probably be wasting your time by reading this week’s Work Story.  Well, now you’ve read it.  How do you feel?  Good?  Bad?  Either way, that’s it for this week.

Until next time, everybody Wang Chung tonight.