this weekend we finally had our carpets cleaned after 3 years of highly attended parties, college football days, and general disregard for regular carpet maintenance. the results, while impressive, still came with a certain cost both financially (almost 300 dollars for not even three full rooms?!) and emotionally, as it would seem fortune deemed it appropriate to send us the least responsible carpet cleaner of all time. so mainly for my own memory, as i will want to tell this story in the future, i’m going to get down some of the details of my encounters with this highly professional individual:

• appointment was made at 2pm saturday. he called to say he’d be a half hour late; he was an hour late, arriving at 3. partly because he went to the wrong house the first time… our address is on SOUTH detroit, not NORTH. that’s what the ‘S’ means, chief.
• on the elevator ride up to our apartment, he laments the fact that he was up til dawn trying to ‘get with this chick’ and boy is he tired. it was a shame her roommate wouldn’t just go to bed already and leave them alone, so he just passed out. also, ‘girls are so stupid sometimes’. apparently he met her at a really exclusive club, ‘where you have to pay to get in’, and kevin federline and prince were there. i was suitably impressed, of course.
• did i mention he had an off-center lower lip stud? it was tiny and gino thought it might be a whitehead at first.
• after spraying pre-treating chemicals all over our floors, he went looking for an attachment to the big steam cleaner he’d brought up, and couldn’t find it. checked the van, not there. he insisted that somebody had ‘jacked it’ after he unloaded it, though i watched him unload and never saw any such attachment, so i assume he left it at his last job.
• he then spent another hour looking for the piece, calling his boss to see if someone could bring him the piece, using the key i loaned him to get into our lobby weightroom to recharge his phone, and finally coming back up around 4:30 with nothing to show for any of it.
• he told me he’d have to come back the next day to finish, so what time was good? i suggest between 11 and 2 so i could maybe go play volleyball. he suggests 3pm because ‘i work at this church sometimes. with kids.’ i consent. no volleyball, i guess.
• in doing a small part of the room just to demonstrate what he’ll be finishing tomorrow, his machine leaks dirty water all over our kitchen floor, which he mops up with a dirty towel before leaving for the day. ‘see you tomorrow bro’, he says.
• i call his boss afterwards to complain and he really has nothing to say, giving in easily to my request for a price cut and, i suspect, inwardly wondering why he ever hired this young man.
• i spend the next morning putting together my new entertainment center (more on that tomorrow), and he calls at 3pm sunday to say he’s running a little late and will be there in half an hour. he was an hour late again. i go down to the street to let him in to find him hitting on a girl who’d been out walking her tiny dog. i wait for him to finish his conversation and we head up.
• did i mention the night before he called me at almost 8pm, long after he’d left, asking if he left his keys at my place and could i look around for them? not being at home at the time, i can’t help him, but offer to call if i find anything. i don’t, but am more concerned that this is all an elaborate scam to rob us at a time he knows we’re not home. he hasn’t yet, as i suspect his capacity for planning a theft to be akin to his punctuality.
• when emptying his steam cleaner after the first bit of cleaning, he asks to dump the dirty water out over our balcony. i suggest the sink might be easier, but he ‘thinks it would be cooler’ to dump it off the fourth floor into the alley below. i consent. nearly black water fountains down into air, luckily no cars or pedestrians pass at this inopportune moment.
• after cleaning the place, and dumping off the balcony a second time, nearly 30 hours after the original appointment was supposed to begin for a supposedly two-hour job, our carpets are (mostly) cleaned. he has no idea what the few remaining spots might be or what to do about them. ‘maybe they’re burn marks?’
• he shakes our hands, is glad to have met us, and shuffles off with his machine and bag of supplies — leaving a 3-foot length of plastic tubing sitting on our kitchen counter, which he does not return for.