The Janitors' Closet

Don't fall off

I had a site visit yesterday with one of my larger clients, a vocational ed campus. The facility looks quite good, just a couple of periodic floor jobs (burnishing, scrubbing textured VCT, ceramic) we need to catch over the next class break.  We generally include such occasional jobs as part of our ongoing service; no extra bills for the customer. We did get the textured VCT scrubbing done last night; I try to move fast when I can.

One bit of periodic work needed involves something of a safety challenge - we do an occasional scrub of stairwells, including the yellow safety line.  Here's a before-and-after of the last time on those.

I did notice one issue: a big greasy boot-print in the restroom closest to the diesel repair lab.  I'd not noticed it before, because it's in the middle of a rather high ceiling.  I'd really like to know how it got there.

Which caused me to notice an article today from our good friends at Cleanlink about Ladder safety.  Ladders are so commonplace that we tend to ignore the kind of commonsense safety concerns that we might pay more attention to when using, say, a chain saw. 

I might sum it up as: keep your eyes open, and your grey matter involved.  From the ceiling with the boot-print, it's a long way down.

Future Window Cleaning

Here's a good article on the Future of Window Cleaning, from our friends at CleanLink.  It talks about pure water cleaning, ultrasound, cobotics (essentially, extending one's reach), and drones.  

I suspect quick adaption of existing high-rise rigging (when you see a platform hanging on cables from the top of a high-rise, the window crew on the platform washing floor by floor) to facilitate some sort of robotic system to replace the guys on the platform. 

High-rise window cleaning has  always seemed to me to be a major safety risk; I gather that's why workers comp insurance for window cleaning firms is more expensive than for janitorial firms, like mine. We get to stay on solid ground, doing at the moment nothing higher than three stories.  Plus, there's my fear of heights. 

But, we generally include periodic window cleaning, and well as burnishing, refinishing and carpet cleaning, as part of our ongoing service and price.

Be interesting to see how quickly various systems are adopted.

I'm reminded of bleach and vinegar

It's been a while since I've had to put much thought into the dangers of various cleaning chemicals; we use only Johnson/Diversey chemicals, monitor what's in our janitor closets and on our vans, and train our crews in safety and proper chemical usage. So an article from our good friends at Cleaning Maintenance Management, about the danger of mixing bleach and vinegar, served as a useful wake-up:

"While the hazards of mixing ammonia and bleach might be more widely known, there’s another common cleaning product that can cause a deadly situation if added to bleach, and that’s vinegar.

"When vinegar, often used to clean floors and glass as a natural and safe alternative to chemical products, is mixed with bleach, the combination produces chlorine gas, which according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can be deadly."

As we point out to our crews, chlorine gas killed a whole lot of folks on the Western Front during World War I; we don't want to replicate that experience in our accounts.

Stair safety, while cleaning

I often see advice from various safety gurus about stair safety: Always use the handrail, never carry anything that requires two hands, keep your eyes open, and so on. The old sailors' adage, when up in the rigging working the sails, applies - one hand for the ship, one for yourself. 

But I cannot recall anything on safely cleaning those stairs.

On carpeted stairs, vacuuming is straightforward: use a backpack vacuum, adjust the wand to a safe length, use the wand with one hand and keep the other on the rail.  But many stairs are concrete or rubber - good traction, long wearing, but need an occasional scrub.  Most floor scrubbers are 17" or 20", with a circular pad or brush - much too wide, and heavy.  We have a 9" scrubber, light weight, designed for small areas or, one might suppose, stairs.  But it has a standard three foot (or so) handle - inconvenient and a bit unbalancing, whether one is going up or down.  And it takes two hands - none left for the handrail.

We clean a small college campus, with texture rubber stairs.  Again, a good choice for the high traffic building, but not too easy to scrub.

So, although the 9" scrubber would likely have been faster, we used a small hand-held device, battery powered so there was no chord to trip over.

Nice results, and no-one injured. 

Chemical by who?

It might make a difference where you source your cleaning chemicals.

Anecdotally, a fair number of smaller operators (certainly not all) and some folks with the janitorial franchising operations pick up chemicals at convenience or discount stores.  They're less expensive (at least in small quantities), and are open late, which is an advantage if you don't monitor your supplies, and run out mid-shift.

Buying from a janitorial industry supplier, you tend to get informed usage and safety advice, SDS sheets with the purchase, and have available stick-on factory labels for any chemicals that need to be diluted into, say, a spray bottle.  Labels are remarkedly handy for proper usage, safety, and avoiding unpleasant conversations with OSHA.

Here's a recent news article from our friends at Cleanlink regarding a $1.68 million fine OSHA is proposing against Dollar Stores, for a variety of safety issues at multiple locations. Stands to reason that if a store is facing challenges in insuring safety among its own employees, it might not be too serious about safety among its customers.

From the article: "...failing to keep receiving and storage areas clean and orderly, and stacking materials in an unsafe manner. These violations exposed workers to hazards associated with slips, trips and being struck-by objects.

"OSHA citations also included those for exposing workers to fire and entrapment hazards by failing to keep exit routes and electrical panels clear and unobstructed. Finally, the company received citations for failing to mount and label fire extinguishers, and having a locked exit door that required a key to open."  

Here's a bit about what we do.

Almost an accident

We've gone several years without a significant on the job accident.  Now, commercial janitorial service is not a particularly dangerous industry, and we've long tried to instill a safety culture in our folks.  Still, we've enjoyed a remarkedly good record .

Looked like our string was coming to an end late last week.  One of my floor techs missed his footing coming down the stairs in my own office, and tumbled from the next to the last step to the floor.  He landed right on his bad hip (he's had a bit of a limp, and some ongoing pain, for a while, but kept putting off having a surgeon look at it.) He says he sat there on the floor for several minutes, just waiting for the pain to come.

It never did.  He slowly stood up, started to walk - without even the usual pain. And with no limp.  He's been fine ever since. Something seems to have popped back into place.

I'm not sure if there is an appropriate accident report I need to fill out.  But it sure looks like we dodged a big one.

 

Decontamination and disinfection ideas that may not be the best

It's nice that many of us are taking cleanliness and sanitation a bit more seriously these days, but a smidgeon of knowledge is a good thing as well.

Here's a bit (from CMM) on a recent study of some 500 of our compatriots, and a few of their "upgrades":

"Among the respondents who reported they had engaged in these high-risk cleaning product practices:

• 19% applied bleach to food items, including fruits and vegetables
• 18% used household cleaning and disinfecting products on their hands or skin
• 10% misted their body with a cleaning or disinfectant spray
• 6% inhaled vapors from household cleaners or disinfectants
• 4% drank or gargled diluted bleach solutions, soapy water, or other cleaning and disinfectant solutions.

Most of the respondents (77%) didn’t know they should use only room-temperature water to dilute bleach solutions, and 65% were unaware that they shouldn’t mix bleach with vinegar. 

One-quarter of the respondents reported experiencing at least one adverse health effect...."

Go figure.

Doing a good deal of COVID-19 "deep cleaning" - that is, decontamination/disinfection, we've taken our usual robust chemical safety training and put it on steroids.  Here's our coronavirus disinfection service protocol.

Doning, and removing, PPE

Personal protective equipment needs be put on properly, and removed properly, in the right order.  Here's a quick video, done from a health care perspective, that teaches exactly that. 

Just doing commercial janitorial, we use gloves and often surgical masks, ongoing.  In the many health care facilities we clean, we're a bit more paranoid, leaning toward eye protection or wrap around facemasks; likewise when addressing a biohazard clean-up (I hate those).  And that's during normal times. When we're called upon to address disinfecting a facility that's experienced a COVID-19 incident, and needs a coronavirus disinfection service, we don the full body suits, as much to protect my folks from the disinfectant (we use a hospital grate quaternary ammonia product) as from the critter we're targeting.  In that case, knowing how to fully suit up and remove is vital; even if we're just doing gloves, or gloves and surgical masks, you still need to do the job correctly.

If memory service, the two nurses in Texas who caught the Ebola virus a few years ago, during that scare, were thought to have done so during disrobing.  In "Darkest Africa", when exiting the infected ward, the procedure was to hose down the personnel with a carbolic acid solution prior to disrobing, so as to kill the critters before fooling with gloves or gown.  Here, we're too sophisticated for all that, so we sometimes catch something.

In disrobing, the key is to not touch the potentially contaminated side of anything (and then wash your hands, like Mother told you, or maybe more so).  That takes a bit more technique than one might imagine.

So, watch the video, and learn.

Stay safe!

 

Clear your desk

It's National Clear Your Desk day; here's an article via our friends at Cleaning & Maintenance Management.

I don't generally pay much attention to the various often self-proclaimed "days", but this one has a couple of points.  In commercial janitorial, we find it challenging to sanitize desks displaying clutter - clients don't generally want paperwork moved - and it's easy to spend a good deal of time hunting down a given piece of paperwork. (It's often in the sales department, and it's always the big proposal that needs be submitted today, and the finger is generally pointed at the janitor for "disrupting" the "organized"  clutter on the salesman's desk.)

I might suggest that client service records are even more important than proposals.  We used to have a clutter problem ourselves; quite a number of years ago we computerized most everything, imputing several years of existing reports and doing data input rather than paper going forward.  We emptied and sold a couple of 4-drawer lateral file casbinetsv as a result, and can generate reports under a variety of criteria, including quality summations for each crew when we do our monthly in-service meetings, crew by crew.  We used to have to thumb through dog-eared file folders to access such data.

And, I can find my stuff.

Protect thy ears

A subject we tend to not think about in commercial janitorial, and I suspect in a number of other maintenance fields, is hearing protection when using or working around noisy equipment.  Fortunately, about the only equipment we use with much sound at all is the backpack vacuum, and it's not bad.

A good rule of thumb, according to an article by our friends at Cleaning and Maintenance Management, is that if you have to shout to be heard over the equipment, you need hearing protection.  A nice point of the article is a good explanation of how to use, and insert, earplugs correctly - something I assumed I knew before reading the article.

Me, in my spare time, I play in a British-format brass band.  Because I play baritone horn, and the seating in a brass band is somewhat inflexible, I have in some 30 plus years sitting in front of the bass trombone.  So, my hearing is shot anyway.

To give one an idea of the volume that a proper brass band bass trombonist is expected to produce, I'll illustrate with an observation by our one-time conductor, a Brit, who'd grown up in the tradition.  Ralph cut us off mid tune, turned to our bass trombonist - a big, John Wayne sort of fellow, capable of producing an impressive volume.  Told him that his sound reminded him of that of an asthmatic reject from a third rate, girls' band.

Not polite, but it made the point.