Those of you familiar with TMI Thursday know that Lilu gets this train rolling here. As she says, "Join us all in humiliating the crap out of yourself every Thursday by sharing some completely tasteless, wholly unclassy, 'how many readers can I estrange THIS week??' TMI story about your life. Or hell, about someone else's!" This is the latter, because heck, I have relatives reading this.
***This is a one-time special TMI, as I don't really want to do them...Unless it humiliates someone else***
So this story goes back to my days working at CVS. Last week, I told you about the dumbest person I've known. You now get a TMI story from a different store at worked at. For my friends who already know this story and bear not to read it in black and white letters can skip the jump. Here's a hint, a well dressed customer.
So, this was at a CVS store in Montgomery County, MD, but not the one with the dumbest person. I was in my last semester at the University of Maryland and enjoying my 3 credits worth of classes (Advanced Accounting, if you are curious) with a full-time work schedule where I was paid a pretty decent salary.
Thursdays (by happenstance, but before TMI Thursdays) was "Truck Day". That was the day a few of us hauled in at 4 AM to unload a truck with our weekly order. On Truck Day, we were allowed to dress down.
Things went normally for most of the day. As manager of the day, I had to stay until 4 PM when our night relief came in, where everyone else showing up at 4 AM could leave at 2 or whenever the truck was unloaded and shelves stocked. Now one thing I should mention is that this store was called jokingly "Estrogen Store #2". See back then there were only 2 female main store managers in our district of a dozen stores. Ours was the second. It wasn't a gender bias thing, just that women were smarter than us men to take this awful job. Sure it paid well, for some of us, but sometimes it's a bitch to work. At our store, on Truck Day, we had 6 women and 2 men working. Of the men, it was me and Bill, who we called Frankenstein. That is another TMI story.
Around 12 PM, Frankenstein came up to me and said "Have you seen the bathroom?". About an hour earlier, I had to piss, and saw nothing out of sorts. Bill asked me to go with him to see it. We had separate men's and women's rooms. Opening the men's room door, I was hit with it. A bad stench.
Worse yet, the walls. There was crap smeared on it. And when I mean crap, I don't mean stuff. I mean CRAP. Someone had smeared this stuff on the walls. Both of us had to leave the room and I started coughing in a bad dry heave. After a few minutes, I started going around the store asking the staff and the other managers if they had let any customers use the restroom. The company policy was to allow customers in if we could have someone wait with them because it was in the back of the store, not in the open shopping area.
From the group, we gathered that there was only one male let into the restroom after I had taken my piss. It was a white guy in his mid to late 20's dressed like he was headed to a job interview. Even carried a briefcase.
Yes, we were crapped on by a stockbroker, or a salesman, or some other office drone. We never saw the business dude again, so we can only assume it was him. We know it was not Frankenstein. He had his issues, but wiping crap on walls was not his thing.
The next thought was who was going to clean it. I bit the bullet and changed back into my truck clothes. Working at a drug store, I grabbed cleaning and medical gloves, pollen/medical masks, and a bunch of cleaner. I doubled up on the gloves, sprayed the mask liberally with breath spray and put 2 of those on. Then I went in and cleaned. For an hour. One of the worst hours of my working life.
So you might think, why would I do that? Well, I was getting paid some pretty decent money. I come to find out later, it was more than my first accounting job. Also, it was more than some of my peers at CVS who were working there because they had to support themselves or family. Couldn't turn down cash like that. I needed the job because I was using it to pay for the car I was driving, tuition, and some old debts. If I had quit, as a senior with 2 months left to go, I could not replace that income before I graduated, and might have to drop out to work full-time somewhere else. Cleaning crews were considered, but we couldn't find anyone to come out immediately, and you didn't want that stuff lingering around. In hindsight, if I knew about crime scene cleaners, I might have gone that route.
So I kept the job and cleaned. To this day, when I drive past that particular store, I make a note to myself that there is another CVS a few miles down the road. No need to stop in for my allergy pills or whatever. Not when I remember the crap on the walls.
See, that's why if that ever happens at the Bookstore, I'm going to clap the GM on the back and say, "This is why they pay you the big bucks!"
I knew there was no way I could send Bill or another male in to clean it.
Oh. Wow.
You are a saint. I'm pretty sure I would have turned my badge in, then and there.
One thing I'm definitely not is a saint.
You are hardcore bro! Poop smell makes me faint.
Me too! That's why I had the 2 medical masks on!
Dude!! Gross! Capital G. I feel for you bro. I figure those dudes frickin OWE you, big time.
I never collected. This was years ago and I was transferred to another store about a month later, then left to start my accounting career. I honestly haven't kept up with that group of people because we travelled in different circles. But if I were still there, I would be collecting.
Wow. I can't believe you did that! I mean, yes I'm a nurse and I see a lot of crap, literally, but never have I had to clean it up from the walls. I have other people for that! :)
We didn't have other people to do that. No cleaning staff. The cashiers and stockers would quit before doing that