Cleaning Like An Intellectual Game
Working turned out to be very healthy for me. I felt happier and more useful. I often taught that if the idea for working occurred to me before the divorce, maybe I would still be married to my husband. All the time I was blaming him for our problems, but now I realised I was guilty too. When he came home and tried to speak with me about his work, I angrily was telling him that this work is the reason I see him so rarely, so we don’t have to talk about it in the evenings too. My husband was a delicate man, so he stopped talking. I did not talk also. I had nothing to tell. My days were all the same: for two hours in the morning I did my domestic duties and afterwards I watched TV all day long. Now I know that if I had a job, I would not be jealous of my husband’s work and we could have topic of conversation.
When I started working, I was very satisfied of what I was doing. The payment was not important for me. My husband left me enough money for living. So I focused only on cleaning and I tried to make it interesting. As I said it was very curious for me to try to find out something more for different people only looking at their homes. It is pretty easy to guess where does an old lonely man live or which flat belong to two young single girls. But the most interesting part is when you try to see into the details.
Here is an example. When in some fridge I only see empty boxes of Chinese food and a bottle of gin, I know here lives a single man. But when I see that he throws his dirty clothes into the laundry basket, I know that he has separated with his wife or longtime girlfriend recently, because he still kept some habits from family life. Otherwise these clothes would be all over the floor.
So for me cleaning became not only a useful activity, but a funny psychological game too. But these puzzles were not interfering my work. Just the opposite – I was trying even more, because I did not want to miss any detail of my intellectual game. And my bosses (I don’t know if I told you that I work in a cleaning company) were very glad for my efforts.