Can You Go Over This Area Again?

I used to clean carpet. When a customer did not like the way the job was done, we had some pretty good built-in excuses.

"Well yeah, that is the traffic area... I can go over it again if you like." (Notice the excuse followed up by the true sincerity of a non put-out technician)

Or "That line you are getting under your door is called carbon-filtration. The air floats through there and the door acts as a sort of filter along with the carpet and the moisture." (This is a sort of weird phenomenon that we would see in some places, but not all.)

And "It looks like your carpet is polyester, not nylon." (I don't know if it was actually polyester or what. Some carpet just did not have any fluff to it. They would just get these wear-areas that were like nothing on earth. It was tough telling people that their carpet sucked. But it was even tougher to do the whole job again...)

My favourite was this one: "This spot keeps reappearing, because there is soap in your carpet. And, it looks like it has gotten into the padding underneath." (How could I know if it was in the padding unless I yanked up the carpet? We did do repairs, so I could have. That would have been calling my bluff...)

All these excuses equated to one thing. I have just spent an hour here and I do not want to be here anymore...

We would eventually get down there with our spot cleaner and a towel and work like crazy. And, I think that is all they wanted to see, because up to that point all they saw was us doing nothing but going over the carpet with a floor buffer and raking it.

The key to the whole thing was the carpet rake. It looked better than vacuuming. I knew a guy who moved some furniture, spit on the carpet, pronounced it sprayed, raked it and put the furniture right back. The rake fools all.

People always wanted their sofas and stuff moved so we could clean under it. It was never dirty. Sometimes a little dust, which, I guess if you want to pay us to vacuum your carpet, fine!

I remember having a lady sign a waiver once so we could move her tv. I had just taken business law, so I knew that it would not hold up in court, but the boss hung it up on the office wall anyway. Such a proud moment in small business negligence-avoidance.

I am really embarrassed by my behaviour back then. Like the fact that my voice would change depending on who answered the door. The woman got a nice high pitched hello, how are you. The men would get a professional sounding deep voice. I probably would have never noticed this except for the time someone came to the screen and I could not tell if it was a man or woman on the other side. I think I was confused on which voice to use, so I had to come up with a middle ground voice.

I loved seeing how people all across the county lived. Sometimes, it was so disgusting that we had to spend half our time picking up dog, cat, rabbit poop off the carpet before we could start vacuuming. Other times, the people were so rich that we were afraid to touch anything for fear they would sue our company for items more expensive than the whole franchise. Most of the time, people were nice looking upper middle class folk who had the same basic floor plan, same furniture, same off-white berber carpet.

I think next time the guys come out to clean our carpets I will insist they move the sofas...