Mess duty and one less new guy on the job

Oy. Cleaning cabins turned out to be much easier than doing the mess duty. I was assigned to clean the mess, ship-talk for the crew’s lunch room. What you have to do is mop all the stairs and elevator lobbies from the 5th floor to the 10th, vacuum the elevator (which I could figure out how to do, since there’s no electric outlet in the elevator and you can’t do the door-side corners, mentioned separately, without closing the elevator doors), clean the bathroom, and vacuum and mop both the crews’ and the officers' cafeterias. All this in three hours, and alone.

I met the Finnish guy I had already seen yesterday, Joonas (or “Puppe, like the dog,” as he told me his father had dubbed him when he three). He still had the bad attitude which I had noted already yesterday, but I nodded politely his jabber about how great it was that 10 minutes had gone by and we hadn’t had to work yet. Much to my chagrin, I learned that he had had the mess duty yesterday and hadn’t done a very good job. The floor was really sticky and I really struggled with it. I’m beginning to hate those mops that are just rags wrapped around squigies.

I thought about reporting that “yesterday’s guy” hadn’t mopped the floors but decided against it. I don’t care if Joonas slacks off, I just didn’t want to pick up after his mess too many times. Turns out I won’t have to again, any way: Joonas was fired today, after only three days on job. No explanation was given, which I thought was odd, or at least unfair, but they said they don’t have to, as he was still in his four-month trial period.

Yesterday I had thought to myself that “those guys won't last,” but I certainly didn’t expect (one of) them to get canned this quick.

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