ABSTRACT
During my first week of fieldwork at Harrison University (HU) I learn about a specialized team of custodians working the graveyard shift who sanitize bathrooms each night using a revolutionary and environmentally fri endly cleaning device, promoted by its manufacturer as “the greenest cleaning system on earth.” I envision the crew wearing white jumpsuits, protective eyeglasses, and specialized rubber gloves and boots. En masse, they converge on a public bathroom. One team member has this state-of-the-art cleaning apparatus strapped to her or his back. The machine gun–like sprayer has the firepower to disperse with brute force cleaning solutions that annihilate bathroom germs and infections. Since I expect to be spending considerable time during this yearlong research study in campus bathrooms, this high-tech/no-touch cleaning system appeals to me, especially after reading Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich, 2002), which delineated the job hazards I would likely encounter:
For those of you who have never cleaned a really dirty toilet, I should explain that there are three kinds of shit stains. There are remnants of landslides running down the inside of the toilet bowls. There are the splash-back remains on the underside of toilet bowls. And, perhaps most repulsively, there’s sometimes a crust of brown on the rim of a toilet seat, where a turd happened to collide on its dive to the water.
(p. 92)