10. Podcasts & Dog Fuckers

Alexine introduces us to some of her fav classic podcasts and explains what it's like to hear Americans talk about things now that she lives outside of the States; Dear Gawd.
She compares the beloved Dyson stick vac with old-school carpet suckers.
She shares a true poo confession and her frustration with dog-fuckers.
And elaborates on a few feats from her glory days before being fired at the Resort.
Then starts to think seriously about quitting the cleaning company she works for and poaching her clients on the way out...

SFX from Artlist, Zapsplat,  and Freesound.org; 
Specifically: HDvideoguy, Samuel, Craigsmith, JellyDaisies, SuddenDice, SamanthaCastleberry, Qubodup, Kyles, SacredMatt

Credit: Marilyn Monroe 
Give Peace a Chance, John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
MSE-6 Droid, Star Wars (1980)
MIL@PIT Elmore Safe
Oh Brother Where Art Though (2000)
The 3 Stooges
300 (2006)

Written, narrated and produced by AMY FRAHM SHARP
For more info: https://alexinereads.com
Artwork BRAD COLLINS https://bradcollinsart.com/portfolio/...
https://www.instagram.com/alexinecleans/
...

Transcript

10 Podcasts & Dog Fuckers

Having three or four hour chunks of time, depending on the clean, allows for serious podcast mileage. One of my favs is Stuff You Missed In History Class with the current hosts, Tracy V. Wilson & Holly Frey. I really like their down to earth manner and that they genuinely have a good time with history. There’s been lots of other hosts. Two of them spoke in huskier voices like nerdy Marilyn Monroes; HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR PRESIDENT it annoyed me for a while. But, after listening more, I don’t think they are trying to sound sexy; that’s just the way they speak.

Usually history in school was dry as dirt but I do love a good story. I had a history teacher in high school who made it come alive for us. I remember him showing us an intense documentary on the Vietnam War. This big gruff barrel-chested man was teary eyed when he flipped the lights back on. 

Why Won’t You Date Me is one podcast I only listen to when I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a client won’t overhear it. I don’t use ear buds partly because I don’t like surprises, and partly because it’s fun pretending to listen on one of those little hand held radios that your grandpa still uses in his garage. Anyway, this woman, Nicole Byer, is just too much! She’s big, she’s black and she’s a Whole Lotta Rosie; just ask her, she’ll tell ya! Very upfront about her love of giving blow jobs, also near and dear to my heart. She says things that truly will make your eyes water. In a good way. 

Stuff You Should Know is hosted by what sounds like a couple of regular guys. What is regular anymore, I have no fucking idea. One guy, Josh Clark, speaks like he has a mouthful of marbles after getting dental work. He isn’t too worried about the fact that it sounds like he’s got an extra tongue. His co-host, Charles ‘Chuck’ Bryant, is a guy who seems to not really like that Josh calls him ‘Chuck’. They are easy to listen to, especially when hung over.

Listening to Americans talk about things, now that I live north of the border, is endlessly amusing or completely cringe worthy. It’s like watching your younger cousin make an ass of himself because he’s so myopic and has absolutely no idea of the big picture. He’s good hearted but painfully naive. Ah, God bless him.  

I think I’ve earned calluses on the trigger fingers of both my hands from vacuuming so much with my beloved Dyson stick vac. Maybe it’s some mutant growth, we’ll see. They don’t have a power switch, they have a trigger that you have to keep pulled or it shuts off. I’m guessing to conserve battery power. It’s a small price to pay to not have to use those other dinosaurs. I used a canister vacuum the other day that made me want to poke my eyes out. Both of them.

A bulky hammerhead beater bar that can’t fit in many places with a hose connected to the blind toaster droid (aka the mouse droid) with a cord that gets caught in its own tracks and pulls its power line out of the wall. For fucksakes, this is like rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. 

This was at the nifty nerds’ house. On the same visit, I managed to shatter a bathtub jet with my fav crevice cleaning tool: an old toothbrush. It really was no match for such a sophisticated implement. I have two ‘go-to’ phrases for occasions such as this: Cocksucker and Jesus Murphy. Both are enjoyable to say loudly. One more offensive than the other. You decide.

The nifty nerd dad has been renamed The Knob due to the recent ass-plosion he leaves for me  in the ‘master bathroom’. I get it, you pay a cleaner but maybe YOU don’t want to look at the shit-scab for a week while you wait for your cleaner to return. Maybe YOU clean it just because looking at your own shit splats when you lift the seat to pee can ruin your mood as you look at the boudoir portrait of your wife that’s above the ass-PLODED toilet. Come on MAN!

Comparing the throne of The Knob and the Coco Chanell bathroom is like night and day. I have never seen a pubic hair on their toilet! Maybe their bodies are hairless. If so, there is no justice!

Yes poo is a recurring theme in my life. Scrappy Coco scarfed down some nasty leftovers from a visit to Maureen’s last week. The next day, after waiting in the house for over eight hours, he emitted a stream of the hershey squirts so perfectly cylindrical that I thought he had a brown straw sticking out of his bum for a second. No splattering. The Knob could really learn a lot from old Scrappy C. His ability to hold it in for that long raises him even higher than his already lofty position in my heart. 

Here’s a true poo confession: I try to position Scrappy C in a place to poo that I don’t have to pick it up. Not because I have an aversion to feeling warm poo in my hand inside a poo bag, but because the world doesn’t need millions of little plastic bags with biodegradable matter inside. Biodegradable poo bags don’t  break down easily. To be clear, no one wants to step in dog shit. If we are on a path with shrubs and trees on the side and he ventures off the path into the shrubs and trees and then pinches one off, I leave it.  

I was scheduled by my boss / not boss to do a clean with a coworker/ not coworker in a home of colossal consumer slobs. Truly, truly impressive. Granted when you have kids under ten, they love to hoard lots of toys but this was beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before. It took 45 minutes just to get enough stuff off the floors of three rooms to clean the floors. 30% of the crap was packaging. Scourge of the earth, literally. The parents had separate rooms in the basement. Maybe this consumerism was fueled by sour grapes and guilt, a caustic brew.

The person who was ‘working’ with me had solid dog-fucking skills. I do not understand how or why some people can work so hard at not working. Just do the work, you donkey! Stalling and wasting time makes me mental. One of my brothers was like that when we were growing up. He always had to go take a crap when we had jobs to do, the rat bastard. He stayed in the bathroom for over half an hour.  He did grow out of it and went on to have a bonafide WASP-y work ethic. 

Back when I got fired, I was asked if I wanted the announcement of my departure to be ‘a mutual decision to part ways’ or for it to be ‘she was not performing well enough’. I was feeling butt-hurt and I chose to have the statement of poor performance. I have made smarter choices. I wanted some pity, which I got, but at the cost of my dignity. 

Instead of having them make it look like we mutually agreed to disagree, I got to really feel sorry for myself. What was the redeeming value of looking like a loser? Part of it was that they wanted me to work those last two weeks instead of walking away and getting paid for two weeks. I could not stomach the idea of being there for two more fucking weeks and having people ask me ‘what really happened?’. 

I recall two fairly spectacular feats of navigating large, bad-tempered drunks out of the pub away from the public and away from my staff. I know that the entire room, especially my bartender, felt protected from the giant lurching man-bear with his black AmEx card. Who then staggered through the fine dining area, pausing in the lobby when he nearly went ass-over-teakettle in a sturdy wingback chair. After a few moments, he said the spinning stopped, I then continued to lure him back to his plush suite, managing to get past him out the door to safety. 

Oh and there was the toxic pissing man whose belligerent behavior was so legendary that a woman who was at another table in the pub, told me he was an absolute terror at the hospital pissing all over toilets when he was in a snit. She said she wasn’t supposed to say anything but had to warn me. It would’ve been nice to have had someone in upper management acknowledge either of those lively events. Did I want them to notice me or thank me? Yes, I did.  

Too bad my Pied Piper feat didn’t happen when the bartender there wasnt the one that I supremely embarrassed myself in front of by repeatedly mispronouncing Voignier as VOG-ner, dear God. And what did that young, muscular and nearly perfect-in-every-way bar manager go on to do? Be a fucking fireman. Seriously. He’s the super cool guy and then there’s me, the lumpy schlepp. Oh well, it’s all a rocky chair memory now.

Later, in correspondence, the GM stated that the business was doing fine. There was no cause for the panic that my immediate boss had been relaying for months, ad nauseum. I will never know if the GM was full of shit or if my  boss was simply suffering the fate that many children of teachers do, an acute case of over-achiever-itis. It stung but I was no longer required to go some place I didn’t want to go to five times a week. Can I get an AMEN?!  

How about this job / not job? I make $18 an hour and the clients are charged $29. My shoulders protest the call to duty even more now that I know that she’s making $11 per hour, per minion, per work day. The notion of making $29 per hour sounds much better. I’m going to chew on this a little more. Some days, it hurts to try to get my elbow up to shoulder height. The seam on the top of my shoulder alternates between searing pain and a throbbing ache. Are my nerves screaming at me to stop or just screaming because they can’t help it? 

Would my cleans want to stick with me if I chose to leave this company? Would the suspected coke head boss / not boss try to sue me? Finding out if these people want me to stay as their cleaner, if I was to leave this company, seems like the first step.  One thing I know 100% is that working 40 hours a week this hard is for suckers. I will find a work-around. I will.