JoelNothman.com

One of the possible advantages of staying at a place like Hillel is that I don’t need to do things like clean the bathrooms and corridoors. George the caretaker does that, and empties the garbage bin… and people even (rightly or wrongly) leave him dirty dishes for the morning.

This is not always an advantage. Such as today when I needed to go to the toilet but my reading material (which I leave beside it) had disappeared. I went to ask George about it, but he only knew of a comic book and a magazine that were there but he had moved. It seems the importants at Hillel had asked him to clean the area as we are having a few guests staying with us for the weekend.

Frustratingly, I still can’t find what I’d left there; which had stayed there without being disturbed for a couple of weeks. More annoyingly, it’s not something I can easily reproduce: It was a typewritten document of family history translated from a text written in German by a cousin Friederich Nothmann in the late 1930s. The family genealogist in Thornhill, Ontario, had offered to send copies to members of the family, and I received mine with $2.50 in stamps a few weeks ago. Thankfully, others have received copies in Australia, so I might be able to copy theirs when I get back.

In the meantime I’m upset about someone having decided what was mess in an apartment that wasn’t theirs. But maybe that’s what you get for having someone else clean it.

(It reminds me too of the time on Machon when the cleaners managed to send a friendly splash of bleach-based cleaner onto my t-shirt, leaving a permanent pink stain on it…)