Q&A with a carpet cleaner

The last gazillion blog entries have been about hockey and or music. So to spice things up a little I was contacted by a contact and asked a few questions about carpet cleaning. Enjoy.


Elizebeth Nomel: What got you into carpet cleaning?
Briggins: All my life I've been surrounded by carpet. So it is only natural that I would seek to gain experience in the workforce by making them clean.

EN:A typical day in the life of a carpet cleaner?
B:The day starts off waking up early to make sure that I get to work on time. Lunch usually is composed of pre-packaged food that I don't have to touch in order to get it into my mouth. After some mental preparation and meditation its time to load the van with stain and dirt destroying machines and chemicals. We then go to a location with carpet. This may be someones house, an apartment, an office building, you name it. The day is filled with conversations that make absolutely no sense, songs that have never been written, and of course epic battles with stains. You know when the day starts, but never know when it will end. You never know when you'll come across a carpet dirtier than expected.

EN: The biggest stain you've seen?
B:Some carpets are so disgusting I would classify the entire thing as a stain. I try to block the biggest ones out of my memory so they don't haunt me later on in life. I want to be able to have a future that will not be negatively impacted by flashbacks every time I see the smallest stain on someone's carpet.

EN: Your speculations on where the biggest stain came from
B:One that I saw last Friday looked suspicious. It was red and had chunks in it. I suspect that an alien had its head blown off with a double barrel shotgun in that room (after being in a fight with a giant cat. There was more cat hair than carpet in that apartment).

EN: The frustrations of a carpet cleaners
B:People who are unaware of the invention known as the vacuum cleaner. People who think that carpet cleaners really means furniture movers. People who watch you like a hawk the whole time you do your work. And of course, there is nothing more demoralizing than a stain that will not come out. It is upsetting to be defeated by dirty fabric.

EN: How its changed your life and made you a better person?
B:I appreciate the cleanliness of my home. It has taught me the importance of vacuuming and cleaning up spills after they happen.

EN: How are you contributing to society by being a carpet cleaner?
B:I'm not really. I'm more of a taker from society than a leaver. If everybody would just get hardwood my existence would not matter.

EN: The unknown joys of carpet cleaning
B:While doing mundane repetitive work you get into an interesting mindspace where you can ponder your future, perhaps come up with a plot for that novel you've always wanted to write, create the ultimate carpeted building in your head, and much more.

EN: Your dream carpet to clean ?
B: I would love to clean the carpet's of a famous musician's house.

EN: Your carpet cleaning weapon of choice
B: Gotta go with One and Two. Two cleaners that work together to fight stains. Mostly because I pretend that I'm spraying Thing One and Thing Two from the Cat in the Hat onto the stains and that they're the ones destroying the stains.