My back hurt from all the kneeling and scrubbing and yet the red carpet was still visibly stained with colours ranging from white to yellow, to brown and in some places even orange.
I got up to get a good look at the situation and stretched my back
"Oh god. I'm never getting this clean," I looked at the bottle of the yellow cleaning agent in my hand; "At least definitely not with this. Cleanex, yeah right. All it does is smear the stuff, not clean. I need a break. And a massage, followed by a hot shower."
As I was daydreaming next to the food cart, Helena walked over unnoticed.
"I was afraid the stains wouldn't come out. I'll talk to the manager to get this cleaned professionally."
My face turned red with embarassment yet again as she mentioned telling about what happened to the manager. She could read my thoughts and calmed me down instantly.
"Don't worry, I won't tell him what happened," I could tell she was trying to come up with a convincing story when all of a sudden she grabbed the pink slime bowl and knocked it down on the floor.
"What are you doing!? I've just cleaned this!" I yelled at her when the glass bowl broke on the floor.
"Ooops, it was an accident. These things happen," she shrugged her shoulders.
"You're cleaning this time, lady!" I took off the rubber gloves and threw them on the floor with as much force as I could muster; "Why would you even do that!?" I yelled on final time.
"Well," she started with a very soft voice; "we need a believable story, don't we? Someone knocking over the yogurt is very likely to happen."
"Yeah, but... Why did you actually knock it over? The floor is already stained. We could've just shaped the stains into something believable using additional yogurt. There was no need to throw the entire bowl on the floor."
"I guess you're right. I didn't quite think it through," she shrugged her shoulders again; "Oh well. Help me clean, will you?"
Defeated, I picked up the rubber gloves, put them on again and began wiping the carpet yet again. We modified the the shape of the stain a little and admittedly, it did look like it was caused by an accident this time around.
"There, all done!" I exclaimed, having removed the last of the yogurt.
"Uh-huh! Could you please just drive the cart to the kitchen?" She asked as she wiped her forehead with a clean napkin.
"Sure thing."
"It only took us 20 minutes," she laughed when she checked the clock at the entrance of the dining hall. "We still have a couple of hours until I finish and we head to town. If you want you could hang out in the lounge and watch TV. Unless you have something other to do in that room of yours."
"I sure could use some rest after this. Watching TV sounds good."
We waved goodbye and I pushed the cart to the kitchen.
Little did I know everyone would stare at me in disgust when I entered the lounge and lied down in front of the TV. I heard them whisper to one another in their brute language which made it obvious they were talking about me even without understanding a single word apart from when they described what food I threw up.
Most of them left the lounge over a span of 15 minutes of my arrival and to be honest I enjoyed the peace and quiet. The TV programme was a boring reality show and since I couldn't get a hold of the remote to change it, I got up and just walked around the hotel. I found a toilet – that surprisingly enough had the same shape as the toilets back on Oolkana – and counted all the ficus trees in the floor. 173 ficus trees. With 2 hours left I decided to lie back down in the lounge and proceed to get dumbed down by the endless reality shows.
At some point I dozed off and fell asleep.
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- #19 - A struggling door-to-door salesman takes things one step too far
- #20 - A love story about a war veteran
- #21 - The red star
- #22 - A terminally ill child wishes to meet a villain
- #23 - School trip