We’re a dirty bunch, aren’t we?
Every day at work, I sit at the same table, and every day it is covered with crumbs and unnamed spills from a previous user’s meal. Fortunately I bring along some portable bleach wipes, and I’m not above cleaning a table before I eat there. Besides, the office managers come to eat there, too, and they deserve a clean table.
We have cleaning staff, but their hands are full with policing horrid bathrooms that can resemble third world prison cesspools on occasion. Cleaning staff in offices don’t get paid enough to do what they must to restore office bathrooms, pantries and cafeterias to normal.
The problem is that the cause is people with whom I share a genetic connection, but obviously not the same morals or standards.
It makes me feel strange to look at a dirty toilet seat or filthy table and think that somebody in my vicinity did it. Maybe they feel that cleaning their own mess is somebody else’s responsibility, but I am sometimes that somebody else. Everybody is that somebody else at one time or another. I suspect that when some people are the somebody else, they just dirty up a different toilet or table. Shirking responsibility has a domino effect that way, and the job always gets done not by the perpetrator, but by an innocent bystander.
Taking ownership of one’s own human messes starts when one stops drooling on their bibs and ditches the diaper. No excuses.
And don’t get me started on what I call the “useful to trash effect,” in which a food or beverage container, upon emptying, becomes an abhorrent thing which must leave the hands in milliseconds, even if no trash receptacle is around. You can see it anyplace that has more than ten feet between trash cans. Finish the soda, drop the cup or bottle or can if a better alternative is just a trifle too far away for you to actually carry the thing there. What is so uncool about having an empty cup or soda can? Has anybody ever suffered public flogging because they had an empty plate in their hands?
Geez we’re a strange bunch of creatures.
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