Well, nowhere better to write this

My parents have been working cleaning an eye doctor's office for 10 years. Yeah. That's a long damn time.

They work their full time jobs and then go there every night until about 9 pm. The only day they had off was Sunday. I usually help out in the summer because, frankly, I can never find a job and I like to feel like I'm doing something useful.

My parents practically bend over backwards for these people.
Every day someone is supposed to clean their break room. They have their names posted. No one ever does, we always clean it for them. They will check off all their names to say they cleaned it, but I don't think anyone ever has.

The doctors and nurses eat all over where they aren't supposed to. They will eat at their desks, in examination rooms, anywhere. Their research team always leaves food sitting open on their desk. It attracts ant and, lately, mice. My parents will wrap up leftovers or throw away stuff they know has been gotten into along with a note. Then they clean up the mess.

All the employees have their own office/desk area and they're all full of little stuff. Toys, dolls, cards, plants, you name it. It was more cluttered on some desks then in my own room. And my parents parents would lift up all their stuff to clean under it, then dust/wash the stuff off if it needed, and put it all back exactly where it was.

They would clean out keyboards with compressed air and wipe off computer screens. They would lift the glass off the doctor's desks once a week to clean underneath the glass. They would clean inside of cabinets in the offices for crying out loud!

For a year my mom also did all the outside work like weeding, trimming bushes, etc. because they couldn't find a gardener. And she offered to do it all for no extra pay.

The building is barely hanging on. It needs to be renovated badly. The carpets are threadbare, the furniture is all just cheap plywood with laminate and the laminate is starting to come loose everywhere. They tried to fix it by using tape. Yeah... The wallpaper is so old it's yellowing, and the laminate in the bathrooms is so old that the colors are faded. It looks bad. No amount of cleaning in the world can fix it. For example, when I pointed out how dirty the carpets looked in places they had been worn down to nothing, my parents said in the 10 years they had been working there the company has not once paid to have the carpets deep cleaned. When my mother offered to do it for them if they paid the cost of renting the carpet cleaner, they said no. They didn't want to pay the cost.

About a year ago they hired a new building manager to fix all these problems. The building manager hasn't been doing anything. At all. She insisted on following my parents around for about a week while they cleaned after she initially said they did nothing. My mom keeps telling her that their building needs to be redone. She never listens. THen she starts calling my mother at work with complaints. Someone found a rag on their desk (No big deal, go put it in the closet with the cleaning supplies, we must have dropped it). The bathroom floors didn't look clean enough (Ok... let me drop everything I'm already doing at my day job and go fix it? We'll check to make sure our mob head probably needs to be changed)

My parents are not "bums" or "losers" like this lady treats them.

My mom works with a company where she is high enough up that she has a private office with a balcony in their main building. The company pays for a T1 connection for her to also work at home, her own laptop, blackberry, and company car. They send her out of the state all the time to handle clients who could cost the company millions of dollars to lose.

My step-father works as an RN in a mental health institute. He has two bachelors degrees, one in nursing and one in education. And he's seriously considering going back for a doctorate.

Just because someone is willing to clean and maybe even enjoys it doesn't mean they lack the ability to get another job or do something great with their lives.

Well finally it come to this week. The building manager accused my parents of stealing a 10 dollar gift card. Because the person who owned it couldn't find it and only remembered that it had been sitting on their desk at one point. So obviously those shady cleaning people took it and not a co-worker or anything.

My mother doesn't steal. She was an accountant with Steelcase for, I want to say 15 years before she was promoted to her current job.

I hope these people find horrible new cleaning services. I hope that no one cleans their break room so they have to do it themselves. I hope they come begging back for my parents in a week, though I know that wont happen. I at least hope they think about it.