#367 Mop Ups

So I’m driving by this closed restaurant yesterday morning. I look through the windows and see the chairs are stacked on the tables. Eeyew, I said to myself, icky. Now I know it’s easier for the person mopping the floors to get the chairs out of the way. And it’s important to have clean floors. Who knows what kind of food and germs people have tracked around through the day? Boy, if for some reason that was to get on a table, why, people could get sick. Which is precisely why the idea of putting a chair up on the table is so stupid, especially when the chair is legs down. You know, the feet of the chair that were on the ground are now directly on the eating surface. So one is left with the paradoxical dilemma of, in the process of cleaning the floor that people dropped food on, taking the dirt from the floor that was rubbed into the chair feet and rubbing those feet directly on the table surface that people eat on. Because somehow I’m thinking the late night mopper in question is not disinfecting the individual feet of every single chair he’s stacking on the tables. I mean, since the whole idea of stacking them out of the way in the first place is to make mopping a quicker, single slosh-and-swoop operation. Another method is to turn the chairs upside down and stack them on the tables seat first. Double icky. It’s a process I find even more troubling. For the seats are where the butts have been. And granted, while it’s possible that all sorts of germs have been tracked across the floor, it’s absolutely certain that germs have got on the place where people set their fanny. Today’s clothes, particularly those of folks with lesser hygiene standards, are thin, flimsy, and in many cases, threadbare. A germ with the tenacity to survive on a toilet seat would have little trouble making the short migration from skin to shorts to restaurant seat. There to accumulate with many of his bacterial butt buddies and multiply to infectious thresholds. If one were to then take that noxious naugahide culture, upend it, and place it firmly on a table to proliferate even further in the dark and warmth of a restaurant overnight, who knows what accumulated mass of infection would be thriving there for the following days all-you-can-eat lunch crowd. All of this was thought out and addressed many years ago in the restaurant I managed. Oddly, the place was called Dirty Dave’s. Instead of chair flip and stack we did a little thing I call shift and mop. Shift all the chairs to one side of the room. Mop. Wait for moppage to dry. In those days, a nip out the back for a butt sufficed. Shift the chairs to the mopped side and mop the now exposed side. Another butt and restore to normal. No icky feet on table, no icky butts on tables. For good measure wipe all seats with disinfectant solution. Result? Early morning drive-bys don’t feel icky. And may come in for lunch.
America, ya gotta love it.