I was back in Kingston last weekend.
Whenever I’m away from my parents’ house for more than a few days, I can smell it as I walk in the door. That freshness of open-concept carpet and laminate brings me back to the night we moved in, and to the following month we spent making the place our own. The scent is still faintly discernable in the back corner of the linen closet upstairs, so long as you close your eyes and forget to expect it.
Funny how the senses work.
Getting out of bed at 6 a.m. to close the window, because it got too cold, I’m hit with the smell of the damp suburban summer morning. I initially fell in love with it in 2020, when waking up before 7 had deep spiritual significance, and when I was discovering the world on my own terms for the first time. I’d go for walks the length of whole albums just to get the dewy air through my system. In 2022, when I worked full time cleaning residences at Queen’s University, I felt that breeze every morning and eventually got used to it. Being away another two years, though, has made looking out that open window like entering the front door. And so I want to write about the job. But first.
Plates of Late…..more this time for an especially long piece.
XAXAXA, READNROX, PUFFINUS, UKSTEVE, BAHMAN (Maia), DEVIANT, 4HR K9S, BLCKPRL (Mom), GO KNOW, TXHOLDUM, LOONMTHR, BIRYANI (Saskia)
Casual Custodian—Queen’s University Facilities—$15.80/hr
When I applied to the position, I was already no stranger to cleaning up after university students. I would rather not dwell on my time at the Hollywood Hostel, but to put it briefly, the house had three garbage bins and zero compost bins. Taking out the trash meant playing caterer for the property’s freeloading squirrels and raccoons. Many a previous week’s food delivery order was “paid forward” in this way. I had the experience, in other words.
I moved out of there the last night of April, and job orientation at Queen’s was the first morning of May. I made a fried egg and red pepper on naan for breakfast and arrived 15 minutes late, saying sorry on the way in. The girl I sat next to was studying art history or something somewhere. I like to think she remembers me in the exact same way. As a class, we learned the difference between sanitizing and disinfecting, watched a silly old ladder safety video, and did the WHMIS quiz for two hours. For lunch I brought leftover tortellini. In a rush out the door, I’d forgotten a fork. I spent the whole break hunting for one around the campus, but it was May 1st, so all the cafeterias and kitchens were closed. Eventually my angels brought me to the business school, where a fancy stand-up luncheon was taking place in the foyer. I came close to nabbing one of their cloth-wrapped silverware sets before a worker appeared. Never mind the fact that my tortellini was cold and I hadn’t even thought about finding a microwave; I had about ten minutes to scarf it down cold and speedwalk across the university. I contemplated keeping the cutlery, but then, why? Forks and knives alone can’t feed a family.
At the end of the day, while I waited for a ride, I watched a squirrel pick a full croissant out of the trash and carry it around in its little mouth. Then a crow came down and the squirrel had to fight to keep its bounty. For five minutes they chased each other up trees and over busy streets for what could have fed them both. Because I love the sound of my own voice, I narrated the altercation as I saw it. A recording and transcript can be found here.
The next day would not be my first at work because I had my G2 test later that week and needed to prepare. Longtime readers of the blog will know this. So by the time I started, all the other student employees knew where to go to find the daily schedule, and I was already pretending to fit in. It wasn’t until the third week that we got our blue uniform shirts, and were at once led to the imposing facial scanner we would use to sign in and out each day. They also switched up our schedules on us that morning, replacing the regular 40-hour week with a complicated 3-days-on-2-days-off-2-2-3-2 model that had us working fewer hours overall. Until then, I had felt like I was a person among people, each of us bringing something unique to the rooms we cleaned. The revelation that we were numbers to them, numbers with faces and hands and upper bodies of different sizes, came like the end of a dream. Nobody really cared, though, because this job meant so little.
We quickly met the real employees, the full-timers, who would supervise us over the summer. My first conversation with a group of them, as much as three 50-somethings talking to one 20-year-old allows for a “conversation”, was about how the high school they all went to was architecturally innovative for its time, and how kids today don’t get enough time to play outside. Of the Watts Hall crew, where I started, Dawn’s the only one whose name I remember. Dawn taught me everything I know about custodial cart handling and how to lean the shop vac against the wall at break time so that it stays up when you come back. She told me I had what it takes to be a professor, to which I politely nodded. I was wise to get to know some of these people, helpless oaf that I am, because I still didn’t have my key fob to get into the building. Until I sorted that out with administration, I had made sure to come back from lunch just before the full-timers finished their cigarettes and go inside with them. Then right back up the elevator.
To clean a residence room, you first dust all surfaces with a dry microfiber cloth. Fold the cloth into quarters so that you have eight clean sides to work with. Then, wearing disposable gloves that are too small rather than too large, soak a clean cloth in a bucket of Oxivir® disinfectant solution and wipe all solid surfaces. To make your job easier, because that’s what it’s all about, start high and finish low. Carefully remove all adhesive hooks from the walls. Pull downward on the part that stretches while holding the bottom of the hard plastic piece with your other hand. It’s OK if you tear the paint off the wall the first few times, but don’t make a routine out of it. Be sure that all tape and sticky tack is removed as well. Check all drawers of the desk and wardrobe for forgotten items. I found a Queen’s bucket hat this way, with the tag still attached. I continue to wear it regularly. Use Glance® glass cleaner on the window and mirrors, spraying before you wipe. If the room is part of a suite, you’ll need PerDiem® for the shower stall and bathroom floor. Wipe both sides of the matress and every corner of the bed frame. Then, pull the bed into the center of the room to prepare to vacuum. Don’t forget to disinfect such high-contact surfaces as doorknobs and light switches. Once everything’s looking good as new, move all furniture to its correct position (not necessarily the position you found it in!) and replace the bags in the garbage bins. Finally, tape a note to the outside of the door with your name and the time it took to clean the room. Repeat until break, then resume repeating.
Like Getting Paid to Relax
After a few weeks, I stopped having to think about what I was doing while I cleaned, which meant that breaks by the waterfront (a short walk from campus) weren’t spent mentally recovering, but simply physically resting. Kingston has the fortune of being on the clean end of Lake Ontario; I get confused feelings when I think about it in relation to Hamilton, my other hometown. But there are pros and cons to every city. Over in Vancouver, Tess hadn’t started work yet at the local construction company. Many days I would wake her up with a phone call at 9:00 am Pacific while I had my lunch. Otherwise, I’d watch the birds and people passing through, at a safe distance from any other young person in a bright blue t-shirt. You couldn’t ask for a better spot, away from the dust and chemicals.
Near the end of the month, my parents went on vacation to Spain, leaving me to drive the old SUV to the park-and-ride halfway to downtown. I liked that 2009 Hyundai Santa Fe and its natural khaki coat. It was a necessity purchase after my mom’s accident in 2012. I enjoyed blasting the classical station while I took the long way home. But it was not long for this world, not the car nor the habit of driving it. So I cherished those two weeks while I had them. I took the Santa Fe out to Dairy Queen and ate a banana split in an empty parking lot while the sun set. I used my new knowledge of sanitation to clean its interior a bit. We, the car and I, discussed each new episode of Better Call Saul in painful detail as the final season aired. I can’t believe what they did to [spoiler], I would say. My parents have been down to one car basically since they flew in from Europe; the constant rattling of the old engine was too much to bear. I miss it, but the day I come home and see a shiny new hybrid in the driveway, my grief will vanish. I’m still waiting, by the way.
Come June I was “transferred” out of the Watts residence to Gordon-Brockington House, or Gord-Brock for short. The first week there was another game of leaving for lunch without a key fob, because these aging twin buildings apparently didn’t have the technology to let student workers in. Stepping in there was like going back in time to the 60’s, when Gord-Brock was built. I remember the smell of the shaggy carpet in the central break room, and knew very quickly that I had to find somewhere else to spend my time off. As long as I couldn’t get in on my own—and I did try for the first couple days—I needed a space indoors.
At the end of the hall on the ground floor I found, without exaggeration, the perfect spot. It was an unused staff meeting room at the front, with generous windows overlooking the water on two sides, and a full kitchen and bathroom attached. After a week’s unpaid work of rearranging furniture and removing the million dead mayflies from around the windows, it became my personal paradise three times a day. I thought about moving in there, what with the empty bedroom and balcony access. And my, what a location! Right above the beach volleyball court. I felt like I was on holiday in some tropical villa, with my socks up on the coffee table while I had my orange, bagel sandwich, and juice box. It might have been the reason I was getting really into mid-century lounge music at the time, though that’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg situation. Below is an album I went through many times in that sunny little apartment:
I never took any photos of that room, but the layout of it sticks with me to this day. You’d think I actually slept there, but I only dream about it now and again.
It was strange spending so much time in residence buildings when I’d never had that experience as a first-year myself. I was probably a lot less biased about how the Queen’s kids had left their rooms with nothing to compare them to. It’s nice to not have that kind of malice pre-installed when you walk into something new. I could look at the hundreds of knuckle imprints in Gord-Brock’s soft tile ceilings without thinking how much better I was, how I only would have jumped with my fist in the air once or twice. The etchings on the doors were their memories to judge alone. And when I opened the tops of bedposts to find little plastic babies or printed-out photos from hoco ragers or encouraging notes meant for future residents, I was happy to be an invisible non-person for a moment. The students don’t have custodial staff in mind, certainly not temp workers their age, when they leave these mementos—so who am I to so much as process them in my mind for the five seconds before I inevitably throw them out?1 I wonder what I would have left in my residence room, at McMaster’s Bates or Whidden or whatever, if not for COVID-19. Intentionally and unwittingly. Chances are I would have just stayed with my grandmother that year.
You Wanna Pass Me That Pillowcase?
Once we were deemed sufficiently trained in the easy clean-as-you-go arrangement of the empty buildings, they started moving us around a lot more. On weekends (our schedule had us working every other weekend), one was almost guaranteed to be assigned to the Smith residence, where the university hosts short-term visitors the way a hotel would. The work there was fast-paced and intense, with strict time constraints and micromanaged responsibilities. It was on those weekends that I learned how to make a bed in sixty seconds, which is only possible with two people. There was no taking your mind off the tasks at hand, because there was a new task every five minutes. It was a style of work I found I had to mentally prepare for when I was able, which was not all the time. Some days they’d have us spend the morning in a slower residence then surprise ten students after lunch by sending us to Smith, where dirty white linens flew across wide hallways as if choreographed. It was a likely indication of a conferencing day, we learned, if the nearby sports fields were already lined with team tents on our way to sign in.
An upside to the Smith days was that they began with a lot of waiting. After all, who wakes up at 8 am on a Saturday, never mind getting dressed and out of the hotel room? I got a lot of reading done those mornings, in the corner of the staff lounge where all the blue-shirts sat. I forget where I picked up my copy of Saint Francis, Nikos Kazantzakis’s final novel reimagining the life and drawn-out death of the little fool from Assisi. The story is told from the perspective of a man who never leaves Francis’s side, a beggar by trade who knows he’s only human but tries to keep up anyway. It’s one of my favourite books. Aside from reading, the delayed shift was a good opportunity to talk to my peers about things other than what glove size they wear or how many Among Us stickers they found in a hallway. Now we could talk about traffic and gas prices and things like that. It was like we were people again.
Two coworkers in particular brought joy to my days from about the start of July. I won’t name them, but I’ve hardly had to since I finished working there. When I went to see Tess and her family in BC, she took me to the “Bard on the Beach” production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I discovered that evening that there are goblins in this play, and the two of them instantly reminded me of a similar pair. So from then on, they were “the Goblins I worked with”.
Goblin #1, the shorter one, was insistently personable and humble at the same time. He was full of big, bold ideas about how society should be run, and fantasized more than once about being the dictator of Canada in need of an advisor’s listening ear. I’ve known people who can’t help but look out for others; he was like this, and eager to relate to you in the process.
Goblin #2, the taller one, was charmingly reckless and always respectful of elder custodians. He’d never fail to surprise me by breaking out in song if a conversation got quiet, or coming in with a truly random topic of discussion. Theatrical but down to earth, he wouldn’t shy away from speaking up if a complaint was to be made. We went to the same high school.
Together, the Goblins were a blast to work with, if the slightest bit distracting. The three of us made a good team in the spacious double rooms of Adelaide Hall, the women’s-only residence. While they went off on tangents, or found something new to throw at the wall, I kept the rhythm and was contstantly entertained in return. Admin must have caught onto this, because we were sent to buildings together for the rest of the summer. Back when Sam’s Vanity Plates was just an idea, I’d tell them what I had planned for my latest internet presence. One lazy day in July I wrote what would become the blog’s About page, which is in my opinion the funniest thing I have ever written. And the Goblins heard it first. I think about them, one or the other, every day.
With the company I was keeping, I needed some solitude every now and then. Later that year, of course, I would take an official MBTI test (as part of an environmental policy class. What a wild semester) and score 30/30 on the introvert scale. It was a health requirement that I got some time alone to talk to the ceiling lights in the sweltering fourth floor hall. The following is a phone note I wrote the night after a shift at Adelaide, with apologies to my late great-uncle, the poet and plasterer, John Kinsella Sr.
The dead fly smell the droning heat of the bulb in your face the force of the ladder against your shins the rawness of your thumbs from unscrewing pegs All unknown to those who pass below, eyes front, where they should be If they would only see how much cleaner this floor's lights are than the others Then again, flies can only get so high A quarter of a minute's contemplation Your little gift to Level 4.
Now let’s see YOUR notes-app poetry.
The Day I Skipped Work—August 3rd
It began like any other working day. I bent forward like a ballerina to scan my face, checked the assignment sheet, and walked to McNeill House for the tenth straight morning. Like Gord-Brock, Chown, and Adelaide before it, I couldn’t get in on my own and had to wait for a full-timer. Except this time, no full-timer came. I waited on the bench outside for half an hour until I decided to look around. I went by Watts to see if anyone was already out smoking, and through Smith in case I could catch someone at the vending machine. No one was around, so by quarter to 9, I started wandering.
First, I stood in the center of Tindall Field, where the Goblins and I had spent an afternoon watching a soccer game from a Victoria Hall window. I did some stretches, as I like to think I’m known to do. In my imagination, I would wait around there until the first break then try to find a crew to join. But it wasn’t twenty minutes before I was in the library, looking at the German books and trying to read their titles out loud. The 10:00 (9:45) break approached and I made my way toward the residences. I must have had my lunch bag on me the whole time because I remember eating an orange on the way.
Again, no one was around, so I dropped the “I really do want to work!” act. It had to be fate that I wasn’t wearing my uniform that day, which meant the possibilities were endless. This time I went down to the water, where no one would think to look. I did a good length of the trail, from the hospital helipad to the man-made beach, hiding behind trees when I had to stop. Around the corner I went to the diving pier behind the water treatment plant. Here, I sat for over an hour and finished Saint Francis. The final paragraph made me cry, for personal reasons. I read it again this summer, this time getting through the last chapters at Hamilton’s waterfront.
It wasn’t lunchtime yet, but I had nothing better to do but eat. I thought about going back; what if they were looking for me? Would I be fired on the spot if I turned up? Might as well enjoy playing hooky while it lasts. I went back to the library, and read about social life in ancient Rome. It makes no sense to me why you would practice slavery on a societal scale and pretend that everyone’s life is totally stable and dandy. The illustrations were helpful to see how your clothes would get more colourful the more people you owned. The whole time, I was feeling my phone in my pocket, expecting an email with a nasty subject line.
Sunny as it was outside, and at that perfect Kingston summer temperature, I had to return to the water. The beach was filling up with pale naked bodies2, and I simply couldn’t stay. Once already this summer I saw someone from high school, and hoped they didn’t recognize me sitting alone with my shirt off at the bench by the toilets. After some time in the shade I continued out of downtown, into the nice neighbourhood nearby. If I were a Queen’s student, I’d have worried about running into a professor on these streets. I did a lot of walking from around 1 to around 3, talking to no one as I mustered the courage to turn myself in.
Eventually I ran out of places to go, so I hung about McNeill again until the day ended. Looking into the building from the open foyer, the very last room not to be cleaned, I didn’t see anyone in the usual spot. But then I did see them, in the reflection of the glass, passing by Watts across the street. I hid in the corner for 15 minutes, thinking, surely this is it. They’ll stuff a sticky rag in my mouth and dunk me in dirty mop water, or vacuum my fingers till they burst, or make me pick the hair out of office chair wheels. All this a week before I fly to Tofino!
The clock struck 3:55 and I emerged, acting totally unnatural. On the way to sign out, Vivian, the temp who worked with her teenage son, innocuously asked me what building I had been in. “McNeill,” I said, and whatever followed I had to lie in response. She did not deserve that, but it meant I was safe until someone else asked the next day.
And nobody asked. Back at McNeill, I talked with full-timer Chie about the trip I was going on to see my girlfriend. I don’t think we cleaned at all that morning, not that there was anything left to clean. Then, when higher-up Brent came in his van, apparently to pick me up, I thought I was finished. But even he wasn’t curious. He was just taking me to the west campus, where the Goblins and a handful of other students had been sent the day before. I guess they forgot about me, the way you forget about a pair of shoes in your closet.
West campus was hotter, darker, and dustier than anything I had seen previously. Renovations were being done in the main hall of our building, so we had the treat of walking past a dozen moldy Tims coffees at every break. There’s another smell I remember. That final gauntlet of a week felt like a month with the amount of work that had to be done. I was sweeping the floor on the way into the broom closet, or otherwise slipping in dust. There were one or two full-timers we’d see occasionally, but for the most part us kids were left on our own. It was all very symbolic, how we’d grown independent and could empty filthy fridges ourselves. I was phoning it in by that point. I got the Goblins to see how long they could hold a squat with me, and we drew pictures with the girls on the backs of leftover cleaning sheets. The morning of my last day, I saw a dragonfly the size of my hand. Goodbyes were hard for two people in particular. Then I left to catch the bus.
Who says someone with a dust-mite allergy can’t clean rooms for a living? I mean, it was no living, but we did our best. I’m drawn to these jobs because I fundamentally lack ambition and squirm at the thought of being successful, but also because I like when my body and my mind can do different things. It’s how the blog came to be, how my part of the Artsci Musical was written, and so on. Deep down I’m afraid that, one day, I’ll stop meeting new kinds of people and going through new expreiences, having fallen into a hole. And that I won’t realize it until years later. But it’s not like any of those other kids are going to be custodians all their lives. So I take it all very lightly.
I left some of the notes.
Like that band.