Excuse me, but are you going to eat that?

Last Updated on Saturday, September 08, 2012 04:40 pm Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, September 07, 2012 01:00 am

For many, the end of summer signals the start of something else, most often the school year.

For me, the end of summer means no more Saturday mornings spent cleaning other people’s kitchens.

This summer, and last, I worked during Saturday morning changeovers for a friend who owns a housecleaning business in Sea Isle City. It was an eye-opening – and occasionally stomach-churning – experience.

My job was to clean the kitchens, and because of that, I have learned to fear the smell of bacon. The lingering aroma of greasy pig in a rental unit was always the first indication that the microwave oven was going to be wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling thick with the oily spatters of the unfortunate oinker that had been someone’s choice of breakfast meat … all week long.

If he wasn’t already bald, Mr. Clean’s hair would have fallen out at the sight of some of the kitchen abuses I encountered.

Chicken nuggets cooked but uneaten, left in an oven. Crumbs the size of cockroaches in toasters and toaster ovens. Marinara sauce on walls, cabinets and floors. Melted ice cream frozen in a surrealist tableau in the interiors and along the shelves of freezers. Kitchen chairs and stools that bore souvenirs of every meal that had been consumed on the premises in the last week.

I saw more abandoned butter than anything else. Mustard was second to that. What is the specialty of Sea Isle that so much butter and mustard are required?

Hardly ever was anything worthwhile left behind. In an entire summer of scouring, I scored a solitary frozen strawberry daiquiri, a couple of bottles of beer and a jug of rum.

Many freezers were stocked with bags of ice, giving the impression that Sea Isle Ice had been on the tenant’s speed dial. And many kitchen cabinets housed OP’s (other people’s) glassware, with almost every house hoarding a few etched Pour House glasses. Good advertising for the restaurant, but bad for the bottom dollar.

The worst kitchens were those where the renters swore they’d been cleaning since 7 a.m. Any house that requires four hours of cleaning before the cleaning service arrives is a house to give me the heebie jeebies. Surely, “We’ve been cleaning since 7 o’clock” is the world’s most dreaded sentence, next to a doctor saying, “I’m sorry, there was nothing more we could do.”

Cleaning other people’s kitchens required the X factor: AjaX, WindeX and CloroX. The F team -- Fantastik, Febreze and 409 – proved irreplaceable, too.

There’s an art to transforming a train wreck of a kitchen into a place that is free of crumbs, grease, stickiness and half-eaten, left-behind foodstuffs. I don’t get to use that artistry much in my own house, mainly because I react before my floor gets so tacky I can’t lift my feet from it.

As repugnant as the kitchens were, at least they were the appropriate place for used food to be found. Finding spaghetti in the sofa, which happened in one house where a sock, a pen, some pennies and a little rubber bouncy ball had all disappeared, would have been enough to make me wish my cleaning days had ended even sooner.

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