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The Art of Swameegee
10 minutes to a perfect kitchen floor.
It’s quarter of 10, and kitchen close is upon you. You can feel it in your bones. It’s a time of excitement, when the house music goes down and everyone pulls out their own tunes to clean up to. There isn’t a cook or server on earth who doesn’t look forward to it.
Except for that one chore: cleaning the floors.
It always has to come until last, for obvious reasons. You have to do a general sweep, and then a deep sweep, and then a third sweep to really get in the grout between the tiles.
Then you have to get the deck brush and scrub the wet floor, and squeegee the puddles. The head of the deck brush is too tall and the squeegee too long to get under the tables or equipment. They always get stuck behind and between things. Through years of trial and error, you’ve learned the exact twisting motion it takes to dislodge them. It also wrenches your shoulder, but you’re so used to your shoulder being dislocated you shrug it off. Ouch, maybe don’t shrug. Just deal with it.
Then you sweep a fourth time, because the squeegee pulled a bunch more crap out from under the equipment.
THEN you have to mop with a mop head that has 90% of the time been used a day too many and leaves the floor smelling of rancid grease and mildew. You refill the mop bucket with…
