{"id":65137,"date":"2011-09-25T02:38:56","date_gmt":"2011-09-25T06:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/65137\/cleaning-bathroom-confederate-flag\/"},"modified":"2011-09-25T02:38:56","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T06:38:56","slug":"cleaning-bathroom-confederate-flag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/65137\/cleaning-bathroom-confederate-flag\/","title":{"rendered":"Cleaning the Bathroom with the Confederate Flag"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The vast majority of customers come into my store on a mission to complete a project.\u00a0 A lot of these folks are excited by their tasks and it\u2019s quite inspiring!\u00a0 It makes me wish I had more home improvement projects of my own to work on.\u00a0 I was even tempted the other day to buy a bag of bulbs and plant them to beautify the yard of my rented half-house.\u00a0\u00a0 I haven\u2019t yet, but there\u2019s still time in the Fall planting season.<\/font><\/p>\n

Yesterday morning, my toilet broke.\u00a0 Water was spewing out of the top lid of the tank with every flush.\u00a0 Not a stopping up problem.\u00a0 Not a won\u2019t-stop-running problem.\u00a0 Not a little-chain-thingie-coming-loose-from-handle-thingie problem.\u00a0 This was weird and different.\u00a0 It was early in the morning, and although I opened the tank and looked at the mysterious workings on the inside, I could not discern the problem.\u00a0 I flushed again and water came spurting out sideways from the top of that toilet tower thingie on the left hand of the tub.\u00a0 It was early, I needed to get to work and I\u2019d only had one cup of coffee.\u00a0 My renter instinct of call-the-landlord was my first thought.<\/font><\/p>\n

One problem though.\u00a0 My bathroom was filthy.\u00a0 I mean, disgustingly, mildewy, faintly urine smelling nasty.\u00a0 I once said in a video (which you can see at the end), \u201cI\u2019m the kind of guy who only cleans my apartment when people are coming over,\u201d it has been a while since I\u2019ve bothered to clean the bathroom.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t have the landlord or his handyman over with the condition of my bathroom.<\/p>\n

Aha!\u00a0 Not just one, but TWO projects!\u00a0 First: see if I can fix the toilet without having to buy any expensive parts.\u00a0 Second: clean the bathroom.<\/p>\n

\"\"I broached the toilet subject at work with one of my plumbing expert colleagues and learned about cool things like \u201coverflow pipes\u201d and \u201cballcocks\u201d.\u00a0 Better yet, I got to shopping on the retail chemistry set that is the \u201ccleaning supplies\u201d aisle at my home improvement warehouse employer, on the day after payday, no less.\u00a0 If you read my blog a couple weeks ago, you read how I last celebrated payday: a 42\u201d plasma HDTV.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t go quite as far on the cleaning supplies aisle, but I was gathering quite an armful of different kinds of brushes, gloves and chemicals.\u00a0 For the mildewy shower problem, I went with the \u201cthis stuff is so strong, you\u2019ll probably want to leave the house after applying\u201d strategy.<\/p>\n

You may have also read recently in my blog about how I was involved in a customer accident at my store.\u00a0 I leveled a little old lady with a refrigerator.\u00a0 I swear, I had nothing to do with the next accident, but once again, a little old lady was attacked by one of our products.<\/p>\n

I was thinking I had completed my haul there on the cleaning supplies aisle late last night when one of the uppity young supervisors appeared with a camera in hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlright, Joko, what happened?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Whaddya mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe little old lady who got injured here.\u00a0 Did you see what happened?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u00a0 No! I\u2019m just doing some personal shopping!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d the supervisor continued, \u201capparently, one of these cans of oven cleaner fell of the shelf as she was walking by and struck her in the face,\u201d he explained as he took pictures of how the spray cans of oven cleaner were merchandised at about 6 and a half feet above the ground.<\/p>\n

Again, I professed my innocence and went back to my department to stash my haul for the soon arriving closing time.\u00a0 I passed by the front of the store where the little old lady was receiving medical attention from the local fire department.\u00a0\"\" She had a big red welt on her cheek.<\/p>\n

One would think cans of oven cleaner would stay put on their shelves, but apparently, this stuff was easy off.<\/p>\n

Arriving home, applying the advice I got from my plumbing experts, I fixed the toilet in all of about 10 seconds.\u00a0 No need to call the landlord now.\u00a0 But what about all my cleaning supplies?!<\/p>\n

Well, I completed the cleaning project anyways.\u00a0 You could now eat off the tile in my bathroom.<\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

A video intermission from four years ago, the first of two occasions I cleaned my bathroom for a YouTube video.
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* * *<\/font><\/p>\n

On a more serious note, an anecdote from today really made me think about race relations, symbolism and heritage.<\/font><\/p>\n

I had just sold a chest freezer to a customer and was rolling it out into the parking lot on a hand truck to help the guy load it.\u00a0 The customer happened to be African-American.<\/p>\n

As we were heading towards his vehicle, a pick up truck pulled past us.\u00a0 Two young white guys with identical scraggly beards, baseball caps, and tank tops were in the cab.\u00a0 They were quite scrawny with comparatively big adam\u2019s apples.\u00a0 A couple red necks.\u00a0 The entire back window of the truck was blocked by a gigantic Confederate battle flag.\"\"<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Mind you, I\u2019m writing from just north of Seattle in Washington State.\u00a0 We\u2019re as \u201cblue\u201d of a state as they come. Whereas these two fellas in their pick up truck wouldn\u2019t have been a strange thing to see in Texas, Arkansas or Georgia, we don\u2019t see too many of these types on this side of Cascade Mountains.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t speak personally as to what it might feel like for a Black man to see the Confederate flag so proudly displayed in a place that was not only never part of the Confederacy, but wasn\u2019t even a state during the Civil War.\u00a0 If I were in his shoes, I\u2019d be angered by such a symbol of, well, slavery.\u00a0 Here was the banner representing the height of the subjugation of his ancestors.<\/p>\n

In my last quarter of school earlier this year, I took a course in \u201cworking with diverse populations\u201d.\u00a0 Basically, a course in diversity training.\u00a0 We spent a week talking about the phenomenon of \u201cWhite guilt.\u201d\u00a0 I won\u2019t go into it in detail, suffice to say that after this truck passed I was feeling it walking next to my customer.\u00a0 I was embarrassed for my race that such idiots would parade around such insensitivity as advertisement on their vehicle.\u00a0 Basically, what that flag tells the world is \u201cI\u2019m a racist and damn proud of it!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d my customer noted thankfully tying to break the awkward moment, \u201cyou don\u2019t see flags like THAT that often around here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNope,\u201d I replied, \u201cI bet they were wearing mesh baseball caps too.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wish I had thought of something more poignant to say at that moment.\u00a0 See, another thing I learned in my diversity training is not tolerating intolerance.\u00a0 We, of all races,\u00a0 need to step up when racism is exhibited in any form and say, \u2018No, that is wrong\u2019.\u00a0 I wanted to be more vehement in expressing my distaste for what we saw hanging in the back of that truck.\u00a0 I wanted to not to ameliorate my \u201cwhite guilt,\u201d not to apologize for my race, but because it would have been the right thing to say about a very wrong thing to see.<\/p>\n

I wish had that Confederate flag to clean the old pee and mildew off my bathroom floor.\u00a0 That\u2019s about all it\u2019s good for in my book.<\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n

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The vast majority of customers come into my store on a mission to complete a project.\u00a0 A lot of these folks are excited by their tasks and it\u2019s quite inspiring!\u00a0 It makes me wish I had more home improvement projects of my own to work on.\u00a0 I was even tempted the other day to buy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,10,1428],"tags":[81,4285,1206],"class_list":["post-65137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-life","category-politics-2","tag-joko","tag-race-relations","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}