James Nokes Editor

Email address: jfntci@aol.com The Cleaning Institute 955 Karol Way, #3 San Leandro, CA 94577

 Do you clean toilets for a living? 

Is the question the good people at Custodian.Info use as an icebreaker at the start of their site. While custodian.info is mainly aimed at working stiffs who work for others and are likely to be in a union. They have a lot of information you can sift through, much of which you will find useful.

I especially recommend their message board with the many topics for discussion available there you are certain to find several good pieces of information relevant to your situation.Ideas and Tips is the forum where I read the information explaining why you should Flick the Lights to let a cleaner know you're in the room.

 "Flick the &*&%*#@&* Lights!" 

Or at least that's how this subject was introduced to me as a matter of "cleaners etiquette". For those of you who are not familar with the term - cleaners often separate out when they clean a building; several people vacuuming usually, someone cleaning restrooms, someone else cleaning the hard flooring, etc.

It is considered very rude to come up behind someone on the staff running a vacuum or other piece of loud machinery and tap them on the back or shout in their ear to get their attention. It can even be dangerous - both for the poor guy you scare half-to-death and for you, if, after he picks himself off the floor, he decides to punch you in the nose.

The proper way to get someone's attention under these conditions is to flick the lights on and off a few times when you enter a room. They know you're there without being startled, you don't get punched in the nose - everyboy is a winner.

Along with their flick the lights topic, you can find discussions on subjects like: cleaning outside windows in the freezing cold, the right way to wring your mop, and stashing trash bags, among many others. You can learn just about everyhing listed on this board through experience but that just means learning from your own mistakes. The custodian.info forums (or Message Boards - they call them both) lets you learn these tricks-of-the-trade the easy way, by learning from somebody else's mistakes, not by making your own.

 Cleaning Personnel, as a Group 
 Are the Fifth Most Likely to be Injured on the Job 

They list this statistic on their site and they give a lot of good safety information to help prevent you or one of your people from being injured. Click Here to read their safety tips. They direct you to one of my Newsletters on Ladder Safety from this page, although I don't remember any one asking my permission to use it.... Oh well, at least they gave me credit for it so no harm done.

 Sometimes, it's not what you know, it's who you know that counts! 

On their LINKS page they show they know a bunch of sharp people. And yes, Mr. Smarty Pants, they do link to me, but that's not why I say they know a lot of sharp people, or at least it's not the only reason.

Seriously, they have too many informative sites to list here. I suggest you rummage through their site in general and their Links page in particular.

 One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words 

TheJanitorialStore.com has many items to sell on their site. Among them are nice quality janitorial and cleaning images. I'm not going to spend too long describing them, you can see for yourself on their site at: TheJanitorialStore.com They sell other things as well, which I'm not going to go into either because the point of this article is to tell you about free sources on other people's websites not the stuff they sell. It's not that I mind selling products for other people, I do it all the time but only when I make a profit as well and these guys aren't paying me a nickel so we'll stick to their free information.

 Free Stuff 

CleaningArticles.com is their sister site where they keep their free articles. They currently have 198 articles for you. Here is a partial list of them:

Carpet Cleaning (11)
Hard Floor Care (15)
Restroom Cleaning (4)
Washing Windows (3)

Psst, wanna see what that vacuuming guy would look like if you were a Peeping Tom, staring at him through a window with the blind partly closed? Click Here to find out.

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