Why women make good cleaners.

I was supervising today. There is stuff all to do in this a lot of the time. Delegate the work, check it's done, do the mountain of required paperwork and cop the blame if anything fucks up. I took advantage of having little to do and squirreled away to read the newspaper for an extra fifteen minutes at morning tea. I was cosy. There was free crappy coffee (but still free). There was a space away from the sounds of welding, grinding, generators and reversing alarms on the mobile equipment. Relative peace.

It had to end prematurely. One of the workers hunted me down.

I asked him how it was all going in the machine.

Well. He says. It was all going great until the backpack vacuum stopped working. I've checked with the electricians and they say there's power definately getting to it. But it still won't work.

I looked at him, an older man who has the air of being looked after by a wife for many years. The kind of man who wouldn't have a clue how to drive a washing machine let alone an oven. The job he's been doing for the past hour is chipping about a centimetre of dust/mud off the machine flooring in one of the back areas. He's got to cover about five square metres worth of tight edges and dodgey bits with hoses running through it all. I'd figured it would take him the rest of the day to properly, because all our company sent with us was a dodgey little backpack vacuum. Normally our vacuum units take up a whole trailer.

Have you emptied it yet?

Silence.
And a look that said you have to do What?

Seriously.