I did this for a month or 2 in high school-- I must have been 17, as I was driving (my father's car when I could talk him into letting me borrow it occasionally). I learned about the job from a friend of mine who was doing it, and he talked me into trying it out; it occupied 4 hours every weekday at a major AT&T facility nearby after school let out. This was the late 70's and the place was a circus; drugs and alcohol were rampant. One supervisor came to work one day in his stocking feet; he was so stoned that he had forgotten to put on shoes. After a one-day warm-up with the office cleaners, I was started off on the toilets (there was a hierarchy there; you started on the bottom, and if you showed sufficient initiative, I guess, you moved up the ladder to the offices). We cleaned the bowls, sinks, emptied waste baskets, etc. (one guy got canned after he refused to clean the used tampon receptacle in the woman's room...for weeks, all he did was spray disinfectant into it, saying, "I ain't touchin' that!"), and it had to be done in a limited amount of time. I had no great talent for it, or desire to be doing it, but I brightened somewhat after learning that others in our line of work routinely robbed the tampon-dispenser machines-- the same key that opened the used tampon receptacle for cleaning also opened the tampon dispenser (don't ask me who discovered that little trick, or how), and dimes could be shaken out of the coin box. It was chump change, and petty theft of the pettiest sort, but it supplemented my meager salary, and sustained me in the pathetic illusion that I was a budding Legs Diamond instead of a teenaged toilet cleaner. We thieves left work at night with our pockets bulging and we sounded as if we were wearing spurs, thanks to all the jangling change. My first week at work there, my friend and I hooked up with 2 older ex-felons and consumed an enormous quantity of beer with them in their van (they were old enough to buy it; we weren't). It was the drunkest I had even been up to that point, and I floated to work rather than walked, feeling as good as I've ever felt in my life. What a difference a half hour can make! While cleaning the woman's room, it really hit me...hit me bad...and I collapsed. My supervisor, a stoner named Brian, found me sprawled out on my back in the center of the bathroom floor like some Bowery derelict (Thank God it wasn't some female CEO or executive coming to attend to nature's call), and I managed to gasp out, "Brian, I can't clean another f'ing toilet...if my life depends on it!" Brian found my friend in a toilet on another floor (my friend had had the good sense to lock himself into a cubicle before succumbing to the alcohol's deleterious effects), roused him up, and said, "You better get this bathroom clean...now...and then you better help your friend clean his toilets." Somehow, we managed. The next day, Brian got us together off to the side and said, "Don't you ever come in here when you've had more than one beer, you got that?" My friend, more of a smart-ass than I was, replied, "Practice what you preach, Brian!" Ultimately, between the continuing thefts, my pronounced lack of enthusiasm for toilet cleaning, and the continuing drinking (my friend and I used to sit in his car in the parking lot a half hour before work was to start and share a bottle of Jack Daniels to get ourselves in the mood for work), they told me I wasn't cleaning the bathrooms up to the standards they were accustomed to and they were letting me go. I was young enough at the time that I really didn't give much of a damn, and my friend was also let go not long after that. It's been a long time since my toilet-cleaning days and I'm sure the nature of the business has changed...they're probably employing illegal immigrants rather than high-school students now...but exploitation by any other name is exploitation all the same. Wonder if that key to the tampon dispenser still works?
