The only problem with having a Thursday-Friday holiday is Monday.

Especially if you're in the building maintenance biz. Essentially, I had four days of crap to wade through on the Monday return.

I don't recall if I explained it before but I'm the only (Assistant) Engineer who does the lion's share of the outdoor sweep up. As far as I can tell, we contract the everyday outdoor cleaning to A Seattle company that shall remain nameless so that I can complain bitterly about them with impunity.

Which isn't to say that the other engineers never set a broom to pavement. Our two waterfront accounts, though (my babies), are cleaned exclusively by moi. My experience as a janitor/day porter and my wild-eyed zeal (heh) are the major reasons I was hired and given the Piers. I'm often told how nice the properties look and also how consistently nice they've looked.

So after two days off, even in the slower winter season, the place looked like hell. I worked for three hours with the blower and pan and broom to get up four days of leaves and trash. Then, just as I was trying to down the first cuppa joe of the day, Bossman pulled up and we were off to meet with the new tenant and esplain de few tings.

Then I had to skedaddle (not a pretty sight, believe me) down to the locksmith's to have 20 keys made for the tenant and also six keys made for the security company at the Piers because one of the guards lost his access key.

I was also supposed to order a new core for a door at another properly but the locksmith didn't have it in the records and I couldn't find it so I decided that a damn fine pout was in order. I'll take care of that today though.

(A "core" is the business part of an Interchangeable Core system. To explain, if you want to rekey an IC lock, you don't remove the whole cylinder or door handle. Rather, you use a "control" key to remove just the keyway. You put the control key in just like you were unlocking the door and then you turn it. The key doesn't operate the mechanism though, instead it releases a lever inside the core, enabling you to simply pull the core out. You take the core down to the locksmith and they set the pins and springs and imbue the core with Locksmithian juju and when you get it back, it sometimes works right.)

I didn't get back to the waterfront until 1:30. While trying to finish the work I'd started before coffee, I got a call about a blown lamp (yeah, gets more sex than me heh) whose changing I deftly put off until today.

So with about forty minutes left in the day, I still hadn't finished the morning clean up. I still have five "tags" to clean or cover.

I really hate graffiti. Bad graffiti is even worse. I had some new ones at another property but they looked like real street "sign". The ones at the waterfront were stupid wannabe scrawls. One of the mental giants actually spray painted "woot" on a bench. Woot. Gotta be a white kid. Sheesh.

So today, in the rain, I'll try to either paint over or clean off the twenty seconds of kiddietainment perpetrated by a couple of morons. After I change that lamp. And save the world.

Then maybe I'll get to my coffee.