Ahh, state work. What a joke. In the summer of…2001, I worked at a college cleaning dorm rooms. Gross? Brother, no way. It was worth it. Let’s go through my day.

7:00 – Get to work
8:00 – Start working
10:00 – 15 minute break…
10:30 – continue working
12:00 – 30 minute lunch break…
1:00 – Continue working
2:30 – 15 minute break….
3:00 – 4:00 – 15 minutes of work/45 minutes of not-work.

Plus, I got paid like $11/hr which was wicked since I still lived at home and didn’t have any bills except for gas for my car. It was awesome. I don’t think that I had a cell phone yet, either. Awesome.

On top of that, everything left in the dorm rooms was ours to pillage. I got a Sega Saturn, blender, and some other random odds and ends. It was so awesome. I also got to learn how to use those industrial spinning floor cleaner/buffers. First time I used it, I turned it on and ran it right into the wall. Second time, I ran the pad up my leg and gave myself a huge brushburn. After that, smooth sailing. I loved that thing.

I started out cleaning. Like really cleaning. Hands and knees scrubbing floors and windows. There was smoking allowed in the dorms and when you did the windows, which have never been cleaned, there was a yellowish/brown water that came from the squeegee. It was disgusting and I think that saw it and smoked would contemplate quitting. As I progressed and showed that I was a good worker, I graduated to the floor buffer, and then started doing furniture shampooing which was just a machine that was pretty awesome in itself.

We were in all the buildings and all the rooms. I must have cleaned over one hundred rooms that summer. The only thing that wasn’t that great is that if there was a show the night before work, I was dead the next day since I had to get up at 6 to leave at 6:30 to get to work by 7. I fell asleep a few times, but there were tons of beds, and, like I said, it was state work so no one really did a full day’s work.

All in all, it wasn’t bad and I would advise any college kid who lives by a college and might have an “in” to try and get it. I might have tried to get it the following summer but I couldn’t get in.