It wasn’t the best job around, but as his mum had told him on his first day: “Someone has to do it.”
She also reminded him the job needed to be done well as no one liked a sloppy worker.
He had applied himself to his job, took pride in the fact he was doing his community a service.
The job as a cleaner of the park facilities had given him an insight into the community he lived in.
For the most part, people were good, they treated the facilities with respect, but like everything in life, there were those who didn’t.
Of all the days in the week, he disliked Mondays the most. Over the weekend when there was no cleaning service provided the people who used the public facilities seemed to care little and Monday’s was always the worst day.
He would shake his head and wonder what the people who fouled the toilets did within their own homes.
From faeces spread on the floor and walls, to toilet paper blocking the pans and the most obscene graffiti on the walls it was all there at the start of the week, and he worked hard and as quickly as he could to clean them up and make them available.
It soon became obvious to him that his job was not one that was going to take him places apart from moving from one park to another. The reality was the Council were more than happy to have him be the cleaner as the position was not one they had a flood of applicants for.
So, he stuck at it, hating it some days, despising the people who inflicted so much grossness on him and on other days enjoying the conversation he would strike up with the locals.
As the years went by and he grew into middle then older age the job was always there, he knew it wasn’t going to go away.
“As long as people shit and piss, I’m in a job,” he’d say to the guys he drank with at the pub each Friday afternoon.
He never married, he didn’t seek company, he would go home each day scrub his body under the shower to rid himself of the day’s odours and then settle in front of his television and watch the national news and once a week speak to his younger sister on the phone.
His was a job not many, if any, coveted.
Each morning he’d dress in his council uniform and head out the door, ready to do all he could to make his job mean something.
Written for: https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/tale-weaver-251-jobs-28th-november/
Morpethroad 