A job with results

I started a new job. You may remember my brief employment at Rocky’s, a local eatery. This present line of work does not involve money or people, so I should be good.

The position had to meet my stringent requirements: part time, flexible hours, at least minimum wage, and totally disassociated from the world of HOV lanes (“High-occupancy vehicle”), a term I learned last week on the parking lot that is I-75 in Atlanta from 4 to 6 p.m. Preferably, it should be mindless labor.

Of that last goal I shall have to repent (which in the Bible means to turn and walk in the other direction). Barbara J. once told me she prays while she vacuums her house because there is nothing else to do anyway. My work will be bathrooms, 10 of them, and a commercial kitchen, which could be a veritable ministry if I allow it. As Paul said about his job of preaching, “If I do this of my own will, I have a reward, but if not of my own will, I am still entrusted with a stewardship” (1 Corinthians 9:17). May as well go for the reward.

Part of my stewardship is the Hillyard automatic hand towel dispensers (about which more later). The first day of any new routine is always the worst, isn’t it? I’ll bet that’s when most people quit. I made umpteen trips back and forth to the supply closet for things I forgot, found out how potent one drop of Vani-Sol is on the skin, and while emptying the bucket-on-wheels off the second floor landing near the dumpster, locked myself out of the building. Buildings didn’t used to lock behind you in the daytime when I was a kid, so it’s very annoying.

The first day of any new routine is always the worst, isn’t it? I’ll bet that’s when most people quit.

The Hillyard Paper Towel situation deserves its own paragraph because it was the black hole of my afternoon. I knew it would be the moment I laid eyes on it. It wasn’t the placing of the first towel roll that troubled me but the manual requirement of dropping the diminished roll into the well to place a second full one above it. My boss demonstrated the operation, but he went too fast.

Ashamed, I didn’t tell him. I texted him later, and he came back. While struggling to mimic the motions in front of him, I made small talk, asking if he had ever seen the movie Charly, about a mentally disabled man chosen to test out a serum that ends up tripling his IQ, so that he amazes his fellow workers at the factory where he sweeps. This evening I brought my husband after hours (I have keys) to be shown the trick a third time. He just looks at things and knows how they work.

In this regard I am like C.S. Lewis and my husband is not, aha! For the renowned author admits in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy a deficiency from childhood that is close to my own heart: “I had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution. … As to the sources of my pessimism … Perhaps I had better call it a settled expectation that everything would do what you did not want it to do. Whatever you wanted to remain straight, would bend; whatever you tried to bend would fly back to the straight; all knots which you wished to be firm would come untied; all knots you wanted to untie would remain firm.”

Notwithstanding this initial setback, what I like about my new career is results. As a professional counselor, you may or may not be much help to your counselee, and even the value of a CEO is hard to truly quantify—but you know when you have washed a bathroom floor.

There are other perks. I, for the first time in life, possess authority to enter the Men’s Room and see what a Men’s Room looks like, without being a man, or transsexual, or a woman with male-like leanings.

By the time of my next filed report, I intend to be as streamlined and efficient as a Mario Andretti pit stop crew or a Waldorf Astoria maid. And all Soli Deo Gloria.

Email aseupeterson@wng.org