The restrooms at my workplace are cleaned every day, or quite possibly several times per day. They sparkle. You could eat off the floor. What you can’t do is breathe while you’re using them.
I’m not certain from which hell dimension the cleaning products were obtained, but I hope it’s the one to which people who try to disguise mildly unpleasant odors with hugely obnoxious ones are condemned. In an apparent effort to conceal the antiseptic smell of bleach or Lysol, someone has mixed in a gallon of the cheapest, strongest perfume they could find and then tried to cheer it up with a dollop of artificial watermelon scent.
People stagger out of the restrooms gasping for air. It really is incredibly strong, and I’m not at all sure that the good old-fashioned stench of filth wouldn’t be preferable.
A nice guy named Larry seems to do most of the cleaning. He passes by my office at least once a day, pushing a cart loaded with the unholy cleaning supplies, and pauses at my door to chat. I can smell him coming long before I can see him. I try to make small talk while holding my breath, then after he’s gone the smell lingers in my office for half an hour. The man can’t possibly have a single functioning olfactory cell left in his head.
I often wonder why companies make cleaning products that smell so vile! Not only do we have whatever evil stuff the cleaning crew uses, but the hand soap is positively disgusting. Nothing quite like washing your hands, then trying to eat a sandwich without having soap-reeking fingers making lunch taste horrid.
I get to work at 6, so the cleaning folks are hard at it, getting everything ready for the day. There have been times when I had to hold my breath going thru the lobby and interior vestibule. It’s even better when they try to mask it with the fake fruity smelling “air fresheners” :eek:
Is it that difficult to make an unscented cleaning product??
At my workplace, they started using these “toliet cakes” (like a urinal cake, only it hangs in the bowl of the toilet) that smell just like mothballs. Blech! Yes, I do prefer the smell of shit to those things. I wonder if the noxious smell is intentional–after all, if it smells bad in the bathroom, you don’t tend to linger, so you can get right back to work!
I have often wondered who thought cherry cough syrup was a good fragrance for a bathroom.
As for the stinky soap problem, I keep a bottle of hand sanitizer in my purse for that very reason. I wash with the soap in the restroom, but then I get the smell off my hands with the Purell stuff. I learned this trick when one of my dearest friends put gardenia-scented hand soap in her bathroom. gag
Could be worse. Whatever they use here to clean the kitchens and breakrooms smells like an unholy trinity of old stale gasoline drained out of the lawnmower, feet and moldy lemons.
Completely kills any sense of “Hey, let’s relax here for a few minutes” or “Mmmmmm! There’s delicious coffee and snacks in here!” OTOH, maybe they want us to hold our breath, grab a quick cup of coffee and scram.
Strangely, the stuff they use to clean the restrooms is somewhere between a light generic “clean” scent and no scent at all. Maybe ythey’ve mixed up the bottles. :eek:
I used to be The Cleaning Guy, and I can guess how/why it happened. Larry’s boss, or his boss’s boss, or somebody in purchasing fell for a sales pitch, and now the restroom now has 12 times the EPA danger zone for that substance. There’s probably one of three kinds of dispensers.
Up on the wall, a little box trips an aerosol every 6, 15, or 30 minutes. Yours is set for 6. There should not be more than one in a room.
A little box behind each toilet slowly drips a vile overdose of stuff into the toilet. If the restroom is busy, it’s bearable. If there aren’t any flushes for an hour, it builds up. On some styles of urinal, a careless placement of the drip tube can result in getting the stuff directly on a gentleman’s gentleman. :eek:
Stuck to a trash can or under a sink, a 2" square of exuder makes the room smell like, well, not like shit.
What can you do? You can complain to housekeeping (or directly to Larry,) you can tell the folks in Safety that you can’t breathe in the restroom, and if that fails, you can destroy/remove the device. The timed aerosol often will come open by squeezing the sides and pulling forward. Then you can reset the timer, or you can pull the batteries. The drippers work on gravity, and they’re harder to open. They’re just stuck to the wall, though, if you’re up for a brute force approach. A pry bar is quiet, and least likely to break the thing. I have always liked the simple elegance of a two pound hammer. The stick-on solids are easy to remove and throw away.
Please understand, I’m just thinking out loud. I’m sure you wouldn’t actually destroy company property. :rolleyes: Oh, my golly gosh, no.
Ours is a little box on the wall, up by the ceiling. It has a battery operated fan that blows air over a little cup of scented gel. More than once I’ve found the gel cup removed so that we no longer have bubblegum scented bathrooms. Bubblegum? Who the hell wants to associate bubblegum with bathrooms?
We do complain periodically. All that happens is that they change the scent a little bit without decreasing the potency. Before the watermelon there was something even worse - I think it was bubblegum. I’ll snoop around for an aerosol device.