Friday 15 January 2010

A waste of my time

One of my responsibilities here on campus as president of my residence is the kitchen. The students, in addition to the meal plans, are lucky enough to have access to a nice kitchen. There are some pots and pans, mostly donated, and some utensils, plates, glasses, etc. The oven works, the burners too, and there's a microwave and fridge.

Unfortunately, many people don't seem to get that they do not live at home where someone yelled at them to clean up their dishes, or their parents did it for them. They live at school, and sorry kid, but you gotta clean up after yourself.

Since the kitchen is my responsibility, I have to deal with the incredible mess in it. This year has been bad. It was always gross and filled with gross but it was the worst when, on Halloween, a drunk idiot smashed the microwave, sprinkling glass everywhere and rendering it useless. That was when I decided to close the kitchen.

It was locked for a month and a half with a sign on it saying "the kitchen has been closed due to vandalism and a total disrespect for the space". I cleaned the place all up, discarding more kinds of mould than I'd ever seen before. It was GROSS.

Over Christmas, the cleaning staff did an amazing job on the kitchen, something that's not really their job, and was amazing. After meeting with the Dean, I made a new kitchen rule: Any dirty dishes left overnight get thrown away. And open food in the fridge, likewise. The result will be either people will clean, or I'll throw out all the dishes. Too friggin bad.

Up until today it was nice. People cleaned things. I breathed happy sighs when I checked in on it daily and the Dean and I high fived. Today it was a mess. I went in, I threw away five dirty dishes, threw away some cooking supplies left out on the counter. I mopped the floor (where someone seemed to have poured icing down a wall) and peeled layers of YUCK off the table.

Please, idiots, please. Clean your friggin stuff up. This is so not my job.

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