Every other weekend, a cleaning crew is scheduled to come in and tidy up the office.

Part of my leaving town for the weekend was to avoid them. The embarrassment and possible whistle-blowing of being caught in the act of sleeping behind my desk on a weekend wasn’t my idea of a relaxing time. Generally, the cleaners are scheduled to do their work on Friday evening. I’d even seen them on multiple occasions in the past, back when I used to stick around the office after hours, waiting to work my evening job. Killing time at my desk before my 8:00 start time, I would welcome them and let them know it was cool to work around me. They are nice people, working hard to make ends meet and smiling while they do it. But seeing them now posed a threat to my livelihood. Marta, the mother, also cleans my coworker Carla’s house. I bet they tell each other everything.

Maybe not, but you get the picture.

Ours is an easy gig. One main, carpeted room with desks, and a small portion of the back storage area, complete with microwave and bathroom. Having seen them work, I knew it took only a half-hour or so to get the job done.

My plan for evading the cleaners this weekend, I posited, was fail-safe. Friday evening was spent with Linda in El Segundo, with the rest of the weekend to be spent in the Angeles National Forest. I figured by the time I returned from camping, the office would be sparkling and dustless, and the matter of avoiding the cleaners would be, at least for the next two weeks, a distant concern.

When I dropped into the office on Sunday afternoon, I noticed that Marta’s paycheck was still on the lobby desk. The same spot that Carla left it on Friday afternoon.

If Marta hadn’t collected her payment, she hadn’t been by to clean the place. I felt the sudden urge to run.

It’s difficult to articulate the strange feeling one gets, running into his office on a Sunday afternoon, dreary-eyed in his basketball shorts, rustling around under his desk for personal belongings. One might feel like an outsider on such an occasion, an invader of space not his, working quickly to avoid detection by some authority that in reality isn’t likely to exist. He might knock over the trash bin in his frenetic wake, cursing wildly as the refuse of his weeks of scrambling scatter across the carpet, settling in a Pollock splash pattern in the hardest-to-reach crannies. The casual observer would derive great entertainment from watching this unfold. Any consequence is of our subject’s own doing.

Needless to say, I was in a pretty crappy mood.

Did they just waltz in and clean the place whenever they felt like it? Didn’t they know they were inconveniencing someone? I had an office to sleep in!

I’d rather not repeat the entirety of my verbally or physically reaction to this news, but one can imagine it was a fairly animated response, the kind of rant one has the luxury of displacing when in the solitary confines of his own home. After all, this had become my temporary home, and my territorial instincts had been quick to take over. Someone was interfering with my turf and I was pissed about it. I let those emotions freely escape me for the better part of five or ten minutes.

It was absurd, of course, me reacting that way. I had been sweating wildly for the better part of the past 24 hours. I was hungry. I had things to take care of today and the office was the only air-conditioned place I felt like I could achieve them. Knowing I couldn’t stay in the office meant more tramping in the untenable California heat. In summary, I was irrational.

But the truth is that the predicament I was in was my own design. Our office is rarely in use after hours, and there was no way for me to communicate with Marta or her son. My frustration was mired in expectation. I knew I didn’t necessarily belong in the office on the weekends, and I was more than happy to vacate the place when my absence was needed for others to be productive. What bothered me was that I’d gone to such great lengths to accommodate a timeline I assumed was verbally contracted. When people fail to follow through on their promises, it really gets my goat. The problem here, which after calming down for a moment I began to realize, was that no one had promised me anything. No one knew I was taking up residence in the corner of the main office, nor could they have concluded that anyone would be inconvenienced by a change of schedule. As far as Marta was concerned, we didn’t care when the office was cleaned. As long as it was done by Monday morning.

This grounded me a little bit. The reality now, however, was that the cleaning crew could arrive at any time between now and 9:00am on Monday. Any time spent in the office between now and then would be an exercise in risk vs. reward.

So I dropped off my backpack, washed my face, grabbed a water from the fridge, and headed for the cool coast of Santa Monica. At least I’d have some cooler air near the coast. My day had instantly transformed into a more legitimate homeless experience. I napped on the grass in a municipal park, urinated in a public bathroom, showered at a YMCA, ate a pbj sandwich for a meal, and cleaned my clothes at a local laundromat.

By the time all of that was complete, the day was nearing its end. When I returned to the office, it was just past 6pm.

Lo and behold, the paycheck was still there when I returned. No one had come to clean the office.

It had become a twisted game of cat and mouse, except the cat was hiding out somewhere coughing up fur balls, cleaning his hindquarters and taking his sweet ass time with participating in the game. There was no indication when Marta and her son would arrive. Could they drop in for an evening cleaning tonight? They were certainly willing to do so on Friday nights. Or would they choose an early morning cleaning on Monday, as they had done on at least one other known occasion? And, of course, there was the third possibility: That they didn’t show up at all.

In my annoyance, I became more brash. I decided to take ownership of the situation, clear off the surface of my desk, and fold my laundry. It was probably the most I’d ever enjoyed putting away my clothes; carefully partnering two matching socks had become an expression of rebellion. About halfway through spreading my clean boxer briefs and v-neck tees across my desk, it struck me that now would be a particularly inconvenient time for the cleaning crew to arrive. How was I to explain the perfectly strewn wardrobe and accompanying duffel bags, each clearly identified for a particular article of clothing, so dominating the landscape of my workspace?

I decided I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to allow some strangers to orchestrate the winkling of an entire week’s worth of khakis.

It turns out that no one interrupted my laundry. Or my modest dinner. Or my several phone conversations, or literary musings on the laptop. It was 10:30 when I went to bed that night, oddly at ease in the stale air of the back storage area, too tired to care if someone were to walk in on me that night.

– TOH