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When I applied for my job at Delicious Orchards (abbreviated as D.O.), I assumed that the workload and expected output would be rather small. It’s not that I was wrong – it’s just that the methods to which I had to go about my job were rather strange, as was the reactions from the staff around me. And by rather strange, I mean completely alien. I was a “housekeeper,” meaning a glorified term for janitor, with my primary objective being to sustain the overall cleanliness of the establishment. The housekeeping department as a whole (including management) was judged for being extremely lazy, which was a true and false claim all at once. While my co-workers and I did take breaks that lasted well over an hour, when it rained, it poured – our responsibilities were awful. Quick disclaimer: this story is going to get rather disgusting, but don’t let that stop you from deriving a sense of entertainment from my plight.
What I consider to be the defining, all-encompassing example of what my job was, occurred on a fresh, breezy and beautiful spring day, when a men’s room urinal became clogged. Our manager relayed the call to us, which succeeded in completely ruining our day because we knew what we had to do. The process of replacing a urinal cake is disgusting – it involves physically grabbing the old 
cake to replace it, but only after the filter is removed. The point is that the smell that emits itself from the utility during the cleaning process is absolutely disgusting, putrid, abhorrent, rancid, etc (whatever grotesque adjective you want to paste in there). The co-worker who I was changing the cake and filter beneath with was a great guy, but he had the tendency to not think things through sometimes. As he pried the filter out, exerting a ridiculous amount of force on the pliers we were using, the urinal backfired. I froze in fear as I saw the…stuff…all over my leg (I’ll spare you its description), and then proceeded to freak out in a cartoon look-up-at-the-camera-then-yell kind of way.
The weirdest part about the situation was the overall reaction of management when I walked out of the bathroom smelling like something just died; they honestly didn’t seem to mind at all. When I asked my manager whether I should change into a different pair of pants or clean up, he responded by saying “did you clean that spill by the registers? I don’t think anybody got to it yet.” If I even tried to clean the register section, people would look at me and be convinced that I just buried a dead body. These atypical reactions weren’t just from my manager though – a supervisor responded with “Did you clean the floor yet?” I wasn’t even mad at their responses as much as I was amazed that they didn’t even acknowledge the war crime on my leg.
For the rest of the day, I received replies similar to my manager, where it almost seemed to them that I was making an excuse to leave work. From the moment I set foot on the floor for the rest of the day, smelling like I hadn’t discovered hygiene and offending countless customers with my stench, I realized that I would remember Delicious Orchards, New Jersey’s favorite farmer’s market, for years to come. I still certainly do today.
Ian Barbour