The perils of a cleaning service

Here at UEA they have someone come in every day to take out your trash, yet you have to ask to use the vacuum cleaner. This seems backwards to me, but then again I do come from the mixed-up American way of thinking. Apparently, also, British students might as well be common thieves -- so says the cupboard full of "borrowed" Union Bar pints in a friend's house -- and have no problem with that.

So my cleaning lady is named Elaine. We think that Elaine is bitter that we're always sleeping when she comes to empty our bins. I understand, though, why Elaine would be bitter. You see, her job is not really to empty the bins -- that's only a thin veil for the "real job" of checking to make sure we kids are still alive in the morning. So basically here are Elaine's options:

1.) Discover dead bodies,
2.) Piss off/be ignored by sleeping students
3.) Discover students who are very much alive and very much in flagrante.

And all the while she still has to deal with our trash every day. She also has to clean out our "pods" (bathrooms). (But really, think about how much Elaine knows about us. Because we don't have dining service here, Elaine knows when and what we eat. She knows when the ladies of my flat go on and off the rag -- even though we're supposed to put stuff like that in the "sanibin" that NEVER gets emptied. She knows the insides of our rooms and bathrooms, what kind of products we use in the shower, whether we use flippers or not. And in my case, she knows that I sleep entirely too much.)

So today Elaine comes in to clean my pod, and I ask if I can use the vacuum. She says, "Now?" and since I used it right after I asked her last week, I say, "Yeah." Well, as I'm very making a very inept attempt at vacuuming, Elaine is basically standing in the background watching me. It's not a lesson! If she were a master pastry chef, she wouldn't be standing there while I made my creme tarte. Then I finally finish, after the vacuum comes apart several times. Apparently she'd been neading it the whole time. Sorry, Elaine. Then I go into my pod, and it smells like old people, and by old people I mean urine. Now I know this ain't my urine because I run a clean pod. Must be the new cleaning products. l personally think that's a ridiculous idea for a bathroom cleaning product: "Smells JUST like urine!" So either you know your bathroom is really clean or really, really dirty. Good choice, cleaning administration of UEA!

That is all.