Janitors Have It Rough

I've mentioned in a previous blog (The Bartender) about my short-lived job at Shamrock Lanes bowling alley in Airdrie back in the day. I won't use this entry to retread my discontent with that job. I will, however, use this entry to accent that discontent.

Near the end of my tenure as Pin jockey Dave, I was asked to cover more shifts than the usual league nights. I was often asked to cover Saturdays (9-5) and the rare Friday evening. Saturday mornings were the younger group of YBC (Youth Bowling Council) bowlers so it was a deluge of little brats and their cheap idiot parents. But after about 12:00PM, the YBCers screwed off and the lanes were open for public bowling. Public bowling was easily my favourite shift to cover. Joe Everyday never threw the ball hard enough to tangle pins and for the most part public bowlers left their area clean. Furthermore, it was always new people so I never had the opportunity to get to know them and eventually despise them for being bowlers. It was usually good times. Usually.

One Saturday afternoon, I had just finished cleaning the washrooms (Dane Cook has good reason to ask in his act "WHY IS EVERYTHING ALWAYS WET?"). The washrooms were always pretty gross. Especially on league nights when some drunk dickhead would stumble into the washroom and use the ashtray as a urinal. Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it was always a relief when I was finished such an awful task. I returned to the counter and enjoyed the silence of an empty bowling alley. I flipped on the big screen television in the lounge and watched Sliders on satellite (I had an enormous crush on Sabrina Lloyd back then...still kind of do actually). About twenty minutes later, a group of people paraded into the bowling alley. Whenever I saw a parade of people I figured it was going to be bad news, but this time I wasn't so harsh. Most of the people were mentally and/or physically handicapped (or is it handi-able?) and the remaining people were helpers. The mentally and physically challenged (yes, that sounds suitably PC for this post) all seemed to be happy and excited, so I thought it was cool that someone set up an outing for them.

I set up the computers for all the players and bumpers for all the lanes and then sat back to watch the ensuing hilarity. Despite there being four or five lanes active, only one person bowled at any given time while the rest of the group watched (and later applauded the bowl).

You think me cruel to laugh, but these people were the funniest bowlers I've ever seen. I remember one person with Down's Syndrome who was just pacing around while holding a bowling ball - He was slapping the ball with his hand while sticking his tongue out and making deflating-balloon noises. Another person repeatedly tried running down the lane in a fit of anger when he didn't knock down the pins but EVERY TIME would biff out because the lanes were slippery.

At any rate, karma is a bitch and my internal laughter was Type Bad Karma. And payback was swift. About half way through their games, there was one lady whose turn it was to bowl. I remember her well because she ruined my life. She was wearing brown cords and a white-yellow sweater. She had brown hair that was as much a rat's nest as it was human hair. She had Down's Syndrome, but no mental or physical disability was going to spare her my hatred. She walked up to the mark with a ball in her hands. She stood, aimed her ball, and was about ready to bowl.

Out of nowhere, she turned to her handler helper and said "Uh oh." She then dropped the ball on the spot and darted toward the washrooms. At first I thought little of it until some of the other people began to mill around where the girl was standing while making "ewww" noises. One of the helpers came to the counter and said "there's been an accident."

Shit.

Literally.

I walked over to the spot and noticed a puddle of diarrhea where she had been standing. There were then little drops that made a trail from that spot to the washroom where the girl ran. Myself and one of the helpers walked to the washroom. A journey I should have never taken, what I saw still haunts me to this day.

There was this grown women (albeit mentally challenged), crying in the corner of the women's washroom. She had taken off her socks and pants, which were now sitting in the middle of the floor. One sock was clean but the other was completely stained with diarrhea and her pants were wet in appearance along the visible leg...that's right...shit wet.

Worst of all, there was liquid crap EVERYWHERE! I'm not sure what the hell she did, but she seemed to have tried the GAP challenge in the washroom I just cleaned! There were smears and hand prints on all the damn walls and smears all over the friggin' floor (probably from when she took off her clothes and crawled to the corner). Smearing over the stall door in the corner revealed that was the stall she chose to enter to "evacuate" herself. The stall itself was even worse. So bad that I got that dry-heaving, I'm-going-to-throw-up sensation. There was diarrhea all over the floor. A whole bunch of it. Yes, what you're thinking is correct...she ALMOST made it to the toilet, but not quite. That last foot and a half was too much to ask and so she dumped her bowels all over the floor. Ironically, the toilet was still sparking clean aside from some minor splatter at the base.

I kept my cool because the woman was clearly distraught. I left the washroom while the helper dealt with the situation. There were spare clothes in one of the vehicles upstairs (I'm guessing this kind of thing is a regular occurrence?) and so the helper was able to get the woman cleaned up and dressed. The group never finished their games as a result, and they all left right after the woman was dressed.

Yup. The helper person didn't lift a damn finger to clean up the mess. Furthermore, I didn't even get an apology for the nightmare I was going to go through to get that washroom clean again. They just fucked off and left me to clean up the poo. My boss was the only other employee there and he was lazy and a twat. He wasn't going to touch it. If I wanted to keep my job, it was time to get knee-high in crap.

I wrapped a sweater around my head to cover my nose and mouth and I entered the washroom, armed with cleaning supplies. I didn't give a flying fudge about proper cleaning protocol in this instance. I used the mop to wash the floors and walls alike. I assure you, dear reader, that I was not getting any closer to the mess than the length of the mop handle. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and after about an hour I had cleaned it all up. I joked earlier about how Dane Cook asked in his act as to why public washrooms are always wet. Now you know. Because some poor bastard had to clean viscous poopies off the walls and floor with a mop. The walls were dripping wet and the floor was slippery as well. I didn't care. I was in there for an HOUR! I put up a wet floor sign outside the washroom door and left it.

As a bit of a "fuck you" to my boss for not helping, I stashed the mop and bucket back in the store room without emptying the filthy poo-water. Take that, Marshall. You pretentious prick! I quit the bowling alley very soon after that day (about a week or so). Not just because I was tired of being an unappreciated shitter-picker-upper but because league bowling season came to a close and there wasn't enough hours of work available to warrant staying.

If ever you have a severely upset stomach and know you'll be having a date with the toilet bowl for a while, please please PLEASE do me a favour and take a trip to Shamrock Lanes. If you pick a day when Marshall is working solo, this would be the greatest revenge a lowly bowling alley employee could ever ask for! And afterward, the Pepto Bismol is on me.

The Bartender

Viewer discretion advised with this post!



Many moons ago I regretfully was employed at a bowling alley. Shamrock Lanes in Airdrie to be exact. I hated that job. I wanted to smash my face against the candy counter every single night I worked there. Why, you ask? Allow me to go off on a tangent.

As a pin jockey, I was expected to do a hell of a lot of things. Well over what I should have done for my measly $5.25 an hour or whatever minimum wage was back then. I was expected to run tangles (fix pins when their strings tangled), sweep the lanes with a huge broom, wash the stairs leading down to the bowling alley, clean the bathrooms, clean the lounge, clean behind the counters. Ugh. Oh and I also had to clean the pins once a week. That meant going into the back, sitting down on the hard lane, and cleaning each pin by hand to clear off the scuffing from the balls. Not only that, but I had to rub oil on the pin decks as well (which I usually didn't bother doing because it was stupid and I hated my job). That particular task took forever. Five pins times twelve lanes times about two to five minutes PER pin to clean.

But the worst worst WORST part of the job was serving the stupid fucking riff-raff that came into the bowling alley every night. I worked "league nights," meaning I didn't deal with the general public. I got to deal with the hardcore crowd. Each night had a different type of group of bowlers. Tuesday was youth bowling, and Wednesday was the "light beer" crowd.

I hated them all. They were all so cheap and rude and loud and made a huge mess that I had to stay late to clean up. They bowled regularly (every week) yet still often brought their nasty ass rental shoes back to the counter to exchange for another pair. They were usually fat, obnoxious, and the type of person I wouldn't want to be around. Hell, there was one dude who had been convicted...yes...CONVICTED of raping his own daughter (the daughter and he made amends several years after and she was allowing him to babysit his granddaughter at the time I met him).

The most terrible of all the bowlers, however, were the Thursday night gang. Dubbed the "hard liquor" league, these ugly, high-ball soaked nutsacks drank until they could barely stand. As the blood alcohol rose, their throws became harder and more violent, thus causing more tangles for me to fix. They became louder and more annoying as the Thursday evenings went along. They frequently pissed in the ashtrays in the washrooms and smoked like chimneys.

As bartender, I can say the tipping was atrocious at best. Most didn't tip even a penny. Those that did tip thought it was acceptable to tip the bartender a nickel or a dime. Thanks! On a good night (this being about 7PM to 2AM), I made about ten bucks in tips. These cocksmoking fuckbags were the worst living creatures in the world to me.

Now, when you have seething contempt for someone, you don't want to be around them. You don't want to chat with them and you don't want to be their friend. I frequently became grumpy due to their stupidity paired with my boredom, and so I wasn't in the mood to play nice.

Enter Paul. Paul never was seen without a drink in his hand, except for when he first entered the alley at the beginning of the evening. Paul was a scrawny little pissant of a man, with his outdated specs and tattered hoodie-jacket thing. Anyway, Paul was a fairly sociable fellow and seemed to be liked by his peers. Though that's about as cool as being a stupid kid liked by even stupider kids.

One night, Paul walked up to me and leaned awkwardly against the counter. He ordered a rum and coke which I quickly made so to send him on his way. He instead decided to take a seat at a stool while I was cleaning some glasses and tried to engage me in conversation. In a buzzed slur he said to me:

"Come on, man! Youuuuuuuu gotta come party wish us."

He didn't know my name despite being told easily twenty times in my tenure at the bowling alley...and "wish" was "with," but he was slurring. Savvy?

I told the teabagging crapsack that I was working and so I was not allowed to join the group. Unfortunately, Paul had spoken with my boss and my boss said it was all right to do so. Of course, my idiot boss would have expected me to stay EVEN later to help close if I had joined them. I still said that I didn't think it was a good idea to join them until I was done with my work. Paul smiled, looked me up and down like he wanted to rape me, and said:

Dude, you gotta lighten up! LIVE A LITTLE!"

What I said in response was pure poetry. It not only was witty. It not only scared Paul. But it succeeded in ensuring that none of the Thursday night browneyes would ever bother me again so long as I worked there:

"Paul? How am I supposed to live a little when I feel so dead inside?"

Deadpan delivery. Paul's jaw dropped and he stumbled off the stool without saying a word. Paul never talked to me again, and it seemed as though all the bowlers on Thursday nights treated me with "respect" and handled me with kid gloves.

Moral of the story? If you want someone to leave you the fuck alone, just make them think you're batshit friggin loco. Oh, and never work at a bowling alley if you want to keep your soul.