Nice Things That Happen

I clean up rooms at a few different motels. This job used to get me down, because I chose to see it like it meant I was without ambition. I was hanging with a fella who wouldn’t ever dare lower himself to a job in which he serves others, and deep down I wanted to impress him so he’d love me heaps, somehow by agreeing with almost everything he said.

Mum used to say, “But Tammy, we all have shit jobs we have to do.” That was when I was twenty-one or so. I think I’ve been suspended in arrested development for a bit, so at twenty-one I still viewed things like a teenager does – kind of short-sighted and like the world revolves around me. Thinking, Yeah, you WOULD think that, Mum, because you don’t have great artistic ambitions like I do. I, who will one day write a shattering novel about real deep stuff. Saying, “But Mum, if I have the choice to get a better job, why shouldn’t I take it?”

Truth being it really didn’t bother me much, on-personal-level. I was just worried about what people would think: “That Tammy! The way she lacks ambition!”

I’ve been single for the majority of the year now, and when I come out of relationships I try to do what I think is healthiest for me, and that is restore my sense of self-worth and identity. The end of a relationship turns you topsy-turvy. You ache and you grieve and you’re lost for a while, coming to terms. So I had to get to the core. Gotta always start from the bottom up, right? Thinking, Now that I am again an independent woman, let’s build myself up again. Starting with: My attitude on things. I have been very unhappy lately. Why is this?: My attitude has been making me unhappy. For instance: How I feel about my job.

Sometime Autumn-time, I spent a day talking with a friend of mine who is a Christian. She was telling me about the roots of her faith, what she believes Christianity is all about. As she spoke, St Paul’s Cathedral loomed proudly above us in the background, clanging its thick bells dramatically. “I believe Christianity is all about service…” she said, which then led us to talking about our jobs. She – doing admin-type-stuff for a charity, me – cleaning up after strangers. I told her a good friend of mine, who is unemployed but was about-a-year-ago working full-time, told me, during his employed years, that I was ‘a bum who didn’t have a real job’.

Her face expressed aghast disbelief. “What?” she said. “Cleaning is not a bum job at all! Without cleaners, society would turn to crap!”

I said, “I feel like I could be doing something more purposeful. I don’t feel like it is a very purposeful job – I am not really helping anybody.” (At that stage in my life, I was just beginning to creep out of the hungover fog that is the end of a relationship.)

“I think it is a very purposeful job,” she said, St. Paul’s clanging. “You could make somebody’s day by cleaning up their room. You never know, a doctor could return to his room after work, after a really bad day, and feel happy to find his bed made and everything tidied up. And if he feels good, he will be able to help more people.”

This made me feel better. I liked her thinking – broad, conceptual, with respect for cause and effect and an eye for spotting the concealed relationships between distant things. I should have thanked her, but I didn’t. We just talked for a couple more hours.

An elderly lady has been staying in room 34 of the motel where I worked this morning. She drinks from a delicate tea-cup that has a slender handle and a huge crack threatening to split it in two. She’s been there for around two months now, because her television blew up and burnt down her house.

During our tea-break this morning, my fellow cleaners were talking about her. “I can imagine it happening the way it would to my mother,” said one lady who speaks with a calming Polish accent. “She would hear the spark and then see the flame, and then pick up the telephone. And then with the telephone in her hand, say ‘Now, I know I have a woolen blanket here somewhere…’”

Another lady turned to me and said with wide eyes, “She was on the phone to the fire brigade asking what she should do to put it out. They said, ‘Just leave!’ The whole house was destroyed.”

I had no idea about any of this. I suddenly felt a bit sad. I knew her home was being renovated, but thought she was just a rich old lady who could afford that sort of luxury so late in life. I thought for a moment of how I saw her the previous day – sitting on the edge of her bed, talking non-stop into her telephone about carpet as I to’d-and-fro’d between my trolley outside and her bathroom, wondering what on Earth was so important about carpet.

“Poor thing last week though,” said the lady with the wide eyes. “Had to change her sheets about three times that shift.”

“Oh, yes,” said the Polish lady.

“Three times? What happened?” I said.

“She was terribly unwell that day,” said the Polish lady.

The other lady said, “She could hardly stand. I had to change her sheets, all her towels. I had to help her with her nightie, she was too weak to take it off. You could tell she was embarrassed. I said, ‘It’s okay – I’m a nurse’. Then she relaxed. I had to tell her. I’ve been doing that sort of thing for years. She was sick for about two days. We called a doctor for her. She didn’t want me to leave, poor thing. But I had to go, I told her the doctor was on his way.”

I said, “Lucky you were there for her.”

She said, “Yeah. It’s a horrible place to get sick, isn’t it?”

I pondered over that comment for a bit. I disagreed, and I couldn’t work out why she said it. But I didn’t say anything – it was unnecessary to.

“I don’t think she wants to leave,” said the Polish woman. And, at the same time, we all agreed.

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Tags:

cleaning, elderly, faith, service and work