“Tom, you are having a new trainee today!”, informed me my boss on a rainy Monday morning. “What a way to start the week”, I thought to myself but only grunted something inaudible.
My name is Tom Ryan, and I am a crew supervisor for a Kensington tenancy cleaning company. What does crew supervisor mean? Nothing really – it is a cool way for the management to make you feel important and appreciated without paying you extra money. Although I am only twenty-six, I have been in the cleaning industry for almost a decade. Yes, you read that correctly. I started helping in my uncle’s window cleaning company during the summer school break when I was sixteen, and I’ve never looked back.
But back to our regularly scheduled programme. The rainy Monday I mentioned above happened two and a half years ago. I had just been promoted to crew leader, and my manager knew he could count on me to bring the new cleaner up to speed. Our new recruit arrived ten minutes early (always a good sign) and immediately swept me off my shoes. At barely 5 ft 2, she was a tiny blonde ball of positive energy. She introduced herself as Joy (her parents unknowingly had picked the perfect name to match her character) and said she was looking forward to learning all there was to know about cleaning.
A quick side note – our company does not really have a training program. The rookies join a cleaning crew, and we show them what to do, explaining how to work with the tools we use and what detergent to use where. They have to pick up a lot of information in a hurry and do it on the fly. The idea is that cleaning is a primary activity that anyone has done to a certain degree, so we don’t need to spend a lot of time teaching the ABC to people who have chosen it as their job.
It soon became apparent that Joy had little to no experience in cleaning. She was struggling to keep up with the team and couldn’t cope with the onslaught of terms and instructions we were hurling her way. Don’t get me wrong – it was not some sort of hazing. But there is an unwritten rule in the cleaning industry – if you can’t do the job, you don’t get the job. In a nutshell, survival of the fittest.
We had two tough move-out cleaning jobs that day, and by the end of the second one, I could tell Joy was close to a breaking point. Her shoulders were slumped, she was avoiding eye contact, and I was afraid she would burst crying any moment now. When we finished the job, I wished my colleagues good night but asked Joy to stay behind.
“I don’t think I can do this”, she muttered in a defeated voice, “I really suck at it, don’t I?”
“You do”, I admitted honestly. “But let me tell you a little secret. Nobody is good on their first day of trying something new. You won’t be good tomorrow or by the end of the week. But in one month, you will get the hang of it. Give yourself a month, at least – if it doesn’t work, you can always find something else.”
She did not seem convinced. “Come on, let me buy you a burger, ” I said, patting her on the shoulder. It was the first time I had tried to mentor somebody – which felt a bit presumptuous since our age gap was just three years. I took her to Honest Burgers in South Kensington, and over beef burgers and chips, she told me about her studies (Economics and Social Policy at Birkbeck), struggling to make ends meet (hence and cleaning job), and her plans for the future.
My first impression of her had been that she was bright, but I was wrong. She was far more intelligent than just bright, and she knew it. We lost any sense of time, and it took one of the restaurant staff to ask us to free the table to realise we had been talking for over two hours.
Joy stayed with our crew for just over a month. She knew all too well that cleaning was not her forte, and I urged her to switch gears to something that would not take so much of her energy. By this time, of course, I had fallen head over heels in love with her, and we got engaged just three months later. The rest, as they say, is history.