Cleanliness, Orderliness, and Other Lifelong Virtues of Particularity

Today our new housekeeper, Liz, had a rough go of it. She schedules times with residents to clean their apartments, and today she discovered her first couple of difficult customers.

Judy, a resident I've always known to be kind, told Liz in no uncertain terms that when she came to clean she was not to set her cleaning supplies anywhere but the countertop, and that she was to clean only the bathroom and the kitchen. I've been in Judy's apartment only once or twice, but from the one good look I got at the place, it's immaculate, all quilts and heavy oak furniture with lace doilies. "I," she told Liz, "do everything else myself." And does she ever.

Liz is an outgoing, personal, and ridiculously kind-hearted black woman, and she told the story in a way that was inimitable. As she shared it with me and a young QMA I'll call Guinevere, Guinevere laughed and laughed. "Yeah, Judy's very particular," she said. "She folds her dirty laundry," she added for emphasis. "Once a week I'll go in there--" the QMAs volunteer to collect the laundry for residents if they no longer want to do (or are capable of doing) it themselves-- "and I tell her, 'Judy, it's time to mess up the laundry,' and she takes the next thing to go in the basket and just throws it in." With this, Guinevere makes a disgusted throwing motion, and I can just see Judy pitching her lost laundry in the basket, head turned to one side as though she can't bear to watch what she's doing.

Liz continued her stories. "I know! Maria is just as bad! I went in there and was dusting and moving stuff all around so I could get everything, and she said, 'Hey! Don't move anything! Leave it all where it is!' " And I thought this remarkable, as Maria is a resident who speaks only in broken sentences--just the effort it would have taken her to communicate this belies the importance of each thing's dusty place.

Liz hatched a plan to clean Judy and Maria's apartments while they were out, which is completely legit and more than understandable. Around lunchtime I saw Liz again, pushing the cart with her cleaning supplies. She was sneaking into one of the more particular resident's apartment to clean, and her timing was perfect--she was just putting her things away on the cart when the residents were driving, trundling, and gliding back from lunch. "Well, welcome back," I could hear her exclaim to the resident as she tooled to her apartment, "I just happened to be finishing your room..."

A Little Confusion

Our residents talk to one another. They keep an eye on one another. They're neighbors, and bound together in the sunset years of their lives as people who are meeting their remaining days with their dignity clenched in their fists. The residents' cameraderi is, I think, a bit stronger than was the sense of community in my college dormitory. It is more the tone of what I felt in the seminary dormitory-- the feeling that, whether or not you got along with everyone, you're all going through something together.

Given this, I was not surprised when one of our residents, Sarah, stopped by my desk on Friday with a concern for one of her neighbors, Jean. Jean is a thin and exuberantly friendly old lady, who fought off polio as a child and walks on stilted sticks for legs. Sarah asked if Jean had been down to speak with the director or anyone else, and I told her that she hadn't, as far as I knew. Sarah said Jean had a disturbing thing happen in her room, so I told her I would take a message and ask around to see if Jean had talked to anyone in the office.

Each resident has a small lock box with their medication in the room, and the Qualified Medical Assistants (QMAs) visit each room in the morning to administer the residents' medicatioins. They have the key to the box. Sarah told me that Jean had unlocked her room early in the morning, which is what some of the residents do so the QMAs can just come on in. After Jean unlocked the door, a woman she did not recognize came into the room. The woman asked Jean to give her the key to for her medication box--the key, of course, that only the QMAs have.

Jean told her she did not have the key, but the woman was undetered. I guess it went something like this:

"Give me your key, I said," the lady said again.
"I don't have one!" Jean told the woman.
"Yes you do, so let me have it," she pressed.
Jean was by now getting a bit spooked. "I don't know who you are," she told the visitor, "so you better leave right now." And the lady left.

Sarah said that Jean was pretty obviously distraught, and, I thought, with good reason. But, she said, Jean also suffers from some confusion occasionally, so it could have just been that.

Confusion or not, I couldn't help but feel a little creeped out about some lady sneaking around upstairs, past the reception area and into the residents' apartments, terrorizing them and bullying them for their medication. As soon as our director came back into the office, I very solemnly reported the issue to him. He took the news earnestly, and thanked me for reporting it. Then he echoed Sarah's assessment, and told me a little bit more about Jean's confusion. I guess at every resident council meeting she mentions the "four nice young men" who cleaned her apartment only days before, and expresses concern that, though effective cleaners, the men were perhaps unsolicited intruders. Every time she mentions this, the other residents groan and throw their hands in the air. Never, in the one year since the place has been opened, has there been four men come in and clean anything. Maybe, the director guesses, at one point years ago Jean had some men help her with something in her apartment, and she's likely just confusing that with more recent events.

I always thought that, as I gained volumes of years, that some of the older binders would fail from age and use, so that pages would fall unwittingly from between the covers of memory. Another option, I see now, is the dissolution of the bounds we set on the individual episodes of our past, so that all float freely, at times merging without distinction into memories of pure chronological paradox, impossible montages of faces and events.

A Return to Pressing Questions

I just talked to our maintenance man, whom I will refer to as Will. Will is a joker, a funny man, and by that I don't always mean that he's funny. He's ex-military, and sometimes will surprise you with what he knows about what, and where he pulls it out from.

So Will was off to fix something, pushing his magic cart with bits of wire and a small stepladder and tape and lightbulbs and tools. He said he was planning to go to the bathroom, but he couldn't, as the housekeeper, to whom we will refer as Liz, had just started to clean it up.

"What do I write that down as," he said. He and I sometimes joke about stuff that needs to be done around the office, and the various bureaucratic ways they should be written down. "Bowel...Held Bowel, or Restricted Bowel, or something like that."

"Heh. You get worker's compensation for that," I jokingly asked.

"Restricted Bowel? Yeah," he said, matter-of-factly.

Ah! I didn't know about this yesterday, of course, when I wrote about the trial of waiting upon the phones with full bowels. Now I know what I'm due for the duress suffered in the faithful execution of my duties. They should compensate my Restricted Bowels!

I suspect they have maintained my ignorance about this pressing issue because I am a temp. There are certain things they have not bothered to explain, because they are details you go over with new hires, and not necessarily temporary employees. Case in point: today I filled out a survey about the Wellness program at the health system, because as an employee my boss wanted me to fill one out. As a half-employee, however, I could only answer about a third of the questions. I don't know anything about the Wellness program, so I wasn't the person to ask if it had impacted my job satisfaction.

I did write, however, that I'd be more likely to take an interest in my own Wellness if they were giving out free T-shirts.

Man the Phones!

I am the Receptionist. I should have a motto like the Post Office, something like, "Come wind or hail or photocopies or a gaggle of insanely screaming, walker-toting residents waiting for the bus, I will answer the phone before the third ring." Most of the time that's not a bad deal or a hard thing to accomplish--it can be pretty quiet around here. Like right now. I'm writing, after all. But sometimes I feel like the Morton Salt Girl, though without the umbrella. It's raining. It's pouring. Amazing how you can go for four hours without a phone call, and then three people decide to call simultaneously.

I am the Receptionist. This also means, in addition to answer calls by the third ring (company policy), I need to actually be around to answer the phones. If I go down the hall, it's best if I let someone know before I go down so they can watch the phones. For the most part this is no big deal. I have plenty I can do at my desk, like work, or something for one of my other jobs, or read. After all, I am the Receptionist, and I'm doing my job as long as I'm at the desk.

Then sometimes it stinks. I am currently the only person in the office, so thogh I am supposed to be done with my workday, I am still here, waiting for phone calls that may or may not come. Not that I'm complianing. At $10 an hour, I get 16.667 cents a minute to wait upon the phones. At times, though, I would trade almost anything to be able to leave the desk for just five minutes. For example, like earlier in the day, when everyone was out of the office and our QMAs were serving the residents food. Per my job description, I sat chained to the desk, though my whole body was crying out with the explosive bowel movement I had to choke back.

Really, I'm not totally chained to the desk. There's a cordless phone I can take if I do need to leave when no one's around, like if I run upstairs to corporate to mail something. But I'm also smart enough not to think that no one would notice the bathroom echo if I answered the cordless while making my final peace with yesterday's burger from Perkins, and you can bet I'm not taking a pencil and pad of "Important Message For You" Post-Its to the toilet.