Cleaning ladies

I work in a construction compound. It is the tidiest building I have ever worked in, except maybe for the other construction compound that I worked in a year ago. Although we are on a construction site there is seldom any dirt anywhere to be found. The floors are so clean you can eat off of them.

There are cleaning ladies (not to be wholly confused with tea ladies). They are sweet, Cantonese speaking. We acknowledge each other with friendly smiles but our exchanges end there. The cleaning ladies whose responsibility is to clean the toilet (the women’s anyways) and the adjacent pantry. I am in the toilet quite a bit throughout the course of the day because, well, I drink a lot of water and tea (green tea, my now replacement to teeth staining coffee). There is a window in the construction compound toilet that looks out into…dirt and muck that is soon to be a beautiful casino. Every time I go in the toilet after lunch I see the 2 cleaning ladies. Sometimes they drink hot tea overlooking the window. Today they were eating crackers.

But do they really need to eat in the toilet? I mean, seriously, the pantry is 10 feet away.

If I have a long visit in the toilet, I really cannot be thinking about these poor ladies having their tea and crackers and really concentrate at the task at hand – and certainly that has got to be uncomfortable for them.

Perhaps this is their domain, their office if you will. Their sanctuary in a bleak, dirty world. I can respect that.

But I would really like it more if they would have their afternoon tea in the pantry.