Cleaning Public Toilets!!! :)

Wow! I never imagined I would ever do this.

I went for production assisting in Tanaya’s SELP today (Landmark Education). Mr Iyer was my senior in the production team. So I go there and he tells me that the toilets are stinking and asks if we could do something about it. Now I know that the ILP (Introduction Leaders Program) participants do clean toilets and everything themselves. At landmark we create something called a space. A space in which everything is charged with positivity. Including the toilets! No joking, I have seen professors and doctors cleaning them! But I was clear that I am not doing ILP. So when Iyer uncle suggested that I clean them, I exclaimed in my mind (???). Now I clean my loo myself and have no inhibitions to the cleaning side of it. But somehow I was expecting Mr Iyer to make it sound more dramatic . All he did was got the stuff (anti-infectant and other cleaning stuff) and handed them to me!

Then I started my job. Started with cleaning the mirrors because I was not mentally ready yet! The place was stinking real bad actually and there were no naphthalene balls to be found. So I start with Harpic and a toilet brush and clean the stuff. Now came the mopping of the floor turn. I don’t know if the pipe was leaking or someone was playing a game of “My pee farthest” but there were substantial traces of some random dude’s piss on the floor beside the urinal. And it was my job to clean that! I am making it sound very melodramatic but in reality I didn’t feel disgusted . Yeah so coming back to the melodrama. To add on to my misery, the mopping broom was lost. So I had to mop it – the wretched place with my hand. And here comes the bomb. I liked doing it. I didn’t think it was gross. I didn’t think “whose piss am I wiping”. I just felt like, there are people to serve; its my duty that they have a good space and I don’t want their toilet to stink. I would go on to the extent of saying that I enjoyed the experience. It was like a privilege.

But then again, if anyone came inside, I’d throw down cloth and start looking at the mirror!!! And then there were dirty footprints all over the floor again, so I’d mop it again and then another guy came. This time it was my friend Nikhil. So after he was done I asked him to stand out and not let anyone in for the next few minutes.

Later on in the day, I observed the stink again or maybe it was Iyer uncle who told me about it. And there I go again into the war-zone. This time again I moped and someone came and I stopped then he dirtied it, and then I mopped and then someone else came and I stopped and the floor got dirtied again. And there was no Nikhil around to ask people to wait outside! So finally I got present to “why do I need to goddamn stop when someone just barges in”. I am not ashamed of it.

When I was just about to finish. I asked the only man standing in front of the mirror. “Is it stinking?”. He smiles and says no. He was an IL (Introduction Leader – An advance curriculum grad who takes public introductions to the Landmark Forum). He said “Good job Amit”. I smiled and said “My Pleasure”. He then said something about you needing to have a heart to do production or something. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was glad that I actually meant the -”My Pleasure” part of the conversation. I was glad that I got an opportunity to serve people in such a unique way.

DISCLAIMER: Landmark production assisting has got a lot of other things beside cleaning toilets too. Cleaning toilets is maybe only 7% of the job! In fact, as pointed out by Venkat in the first comment, cleaning toilets is NOT a part of assisting at all. (I think Mr Iyer doesn’t know about this either. It was a very unique experience none the less.) But none of the remaining things were as interesting as this. Maybe I’ll write a bit about assisting in some other post some other day.