WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 16

Shitty pants/Noisy sneezers/Losing my sense of time

Due to this job’s irregular schedule, I am losing my sense of time. I don’t know what day it is during most of my shifts. Sometimes I am off on Sunday, sometimes working. Last Thursday, having assumed that my holidays would continue to be the same every week, I came in on my day off. It didn’t faze the bosses, though. They switched the schedule in twenty seconds and sent me out to wipe and sweep.

There are people more chaotic than I, however, as evidenced by the number of shit-stained underpants I find. Drunks, I guess, are losing bowel control in the gents’ bathroom, dumping their shreddies, and resuming the night’s safari with their balls hanging free.

It’s always the gents’, of course, and never the ladies’. Women are not in the habit of entering a train station toilet cubicle, spilling their guts into their own clothing, and leaving the mess behind. They were raised better than we men, or else have better innate psychology. Makes you think…

But the poo pants don’t annoy me. They are carefully tipped out of the bin, into a plastic garbage sack, without my making contact. The thing that bothers me more (and I’ve noticed from working in a public place how many of these exist) is the noisy sneezer.

You know the sneezes I’m talking about: the full-voice, roaring expulsion, the abrupt and raucous spasm the sneezer says he cannot help (again, it’s usually a ‘he’). Maybe these people can’t help it, and it sneaks up on them as much as it does on we innocent bystanders, but I have a question. Riddle me this:

If yell-sneezers really, really, REALLY can’t help it, then how come I hardly ever hear them at the cinema? Why don’t they do it during two-minute standing silences to remember a tragedy? Why not during eulogies? Could it be that they can, in fact, control their sneezing in the face of sufficient social pressure? If I am wrong, I’d love to know why.

In other news, I might be getting scared of the day I have to clean toilets. It hasn’t come yet but today I saw Flint, a man, and he told me he was on toilet scrubbing duty. If you have kept up with my previous posts, you’ll be aware that my company usually assigns toilet cleaning to its female employees, presumably because they need men for hauling bags of trash.

But women are few in our company, and so today they sent Flint. That means that, one day, they might ask me to do it. When I took the job, I thought it included this type of dirty work but was, admittedly, pleasantly surprised to find they didn’t expect it of me. In the meantime, I have grown comfortable not wiping up piss and shit, and the idea has begun to gross me out. Perhaps it would be the best thing for me: to get down on my knees and into the nasty graft. It would teach me humility and, once it’s over, the sting will be gone.

Finally, I had another good chat with another good coworker. I’ll call him Senor S. We were discussing the necessity of adhering to the work manual and Senor S, just like Mr. Friendly, expressed the opinion that you had to skip certain things or exhaust yourself.

‘Just sweep the stairs inside the station, the ones the commuters use often,’ said Senor S, ‘For the others, like the ones outside, you’re fine just picking up any garbage that’s on them.’

‘Flint told me different.’
‘Flint is a bit serious,’ he said.

Bird shit, too, wasn’t something I should worry about, not according to Senor S. You’ll never get it all off the platform, he told me, so just scrub some of the more heinous parts, where the birds have shat all over the place. Give the bits that stand out a good scrub, he said, here and there, but much of it is ingrained in the concrete. The only thing to do is wait until it fades…

I have to agree with him, now, because, after this conversation, I went to the platform with a mop and broom to try and remove an incredible splatter pattern of concentrated avian dung, a Jackson Pollock by pigeons, from a stretch of concrete where a well-dressed young lady regarded her phone.

Anyway… You can give it elbow grease, but it does not come up. You can dim the hue, if you put in the time, but it stays there, part of the infrastructure, a stubborn piece of local flavour. Maybe bird shit is like sadness: It comes out of nowhere and can’t be washed away, though it fades a touch with time…

…More philosophy from me soon.

Read Part 17 here.

And this is Part 15.