Cleaning Before the Cleaner Comes.

“Ceylon, don't forget that the cleaner is coming tomorrow morning. The toilet and the bathroom need to cleaning. I don't want Karen to see them dirty.”

Do other people who use the services of cleaners do this too, this cleaning the rooms before the cleaner gets to them? Is it to avoid the possibility of the cleaner twigging to the fact that the rooms were, indeed, used during the past week by the very inhabitants living in the house they have been hired to clean? Can cleaners really be fooled so easily? Tidying up I understand, it makes a persons job much easier if they don't have to sweep up toys and fold piles of clothes left lying around; but cleaning the rooms, scrubbing hard to make porcelain sparkle, is that not just a wee bit irrational?

Is there, what amounts to literally a small army of people, who are hired as house cleaners in the world labouring under the false idea that really, houses (bathrooms and toilets especially) don't ever really get dirty? Do they not have bathrooms and toilets in their own homes they use, making dirty over the course of a week? Or do they secretly laugh to themselves as they drive in their cars and vans on their way to work, knowing that the night before someone has scurried around like a mad thing, cleaning the aforementioned rooms, under the heavy burden of fear of being found out to actually use the bathroom and toilet. On the other hand, do cleaners hire cleaners themselves, and on the eve of the hired help coming, find themselves manically cleaning the bathroom and toilet before their hired help comes to clean their homes?

The possibility of my thinking about this possibility is making me feel quite dizzy. So much so that I think I might go and clean a toilet and flush those spiralling thoughts away before Karen gets here. I wouldn’t want her to see that our toilet had been used this past week.