Urine =/= water!

[kerrisan]

This is kind of a two for one: a sucky manager and a sucky customer. I am well aware that this thread may be moved to Morons in Management, but I wasn't quite sure where to put it.

One afternoon my manager asked me to clean up a water spill (remember this, folks: a water spill) on the beverage aisle. Cool, I can do that. I didn't even bring the dawdust stuff because I was just gonna spread the water with the mop enough to dry and then put cones around it.

Well, when I get to the aisle, I notice a puddle of water but no container. I assume that somebody else has picked it up so I put some cones up before going to get the mop.

When I get to the front to get the mop, the girl on U-Scan asks me what I was going to clean up. When I tell her "a water spill on aisle 2," Her eyes widen and she laughs. I ask her why she thinks this is so funny. She tells me:

"Because a little girl had an accident. That's not water you're cleaning up."

My manager would rather lie to me than protect me and other employees and customers from bodily fluids that may contain something dangerous? I know why he lied, too: apparently nobody else wanted to clean up pee so he lied to me to get me to do it.

So this changes things from a no-big-deal water spill to a messy/gross/potentially dangerous situation. I bust out the sawdust, bleach and gloves and take care of this "spill" the right way.

I'm sure my manager did something illegal/wrong when he lied to me that I should have reported, but I was so shocked and pissed off about it that I had figurative blinders on my brain at the time.

And to parents of pottytraining children: It may have been a once-in-a-lifetime accident, but put training diapers on your little ones while you're in public (even right after you think they're trained)! It may not be a big deal of a mess for you to clean up at home, but unless you're going to clean it up yourself in public, please think of the safety of others. The employee cleaning up the mess may have a bonehead manager and may just treat it as a water spill.

[Kiwi]

I would be putting in a formal complaint to the higher ups, thats really endangering your health, your customers health and food/hygeine rules in general! not to mention the fact he lied to you!

what a way to boost morale!

[kerrisan]

This was a good 4 years or so ago, so nothing can be done about it now. Plus I really doubt I would have been heard; nobody cares what you have to say unless you've worked there for 5+ years. Sad, but true. Argh, if only I had not been so pissed off maybe I would have done something!

[Ringtail Z28]

A lot of managers seem to have a hard time saying what it is that got spilled on the floor. Maybe because they think it's unprofessional to just come out and say that there is piss on the floor. What they don't get is that it's worse to hide what it really is rather than to just come out and say it. Just typical management overcomplicating things.

[Tanizaki]

My manager would rather lie to me than protect me and other employees and customers from bodily fluids that may contain something dangerous? I know why he lied, too: apparently nobody else wanted to clean up pee so he lied to me to get me to do it.

I agree that your manager should not have lied.

But, urine is sterile. What danger did you fear from the whiz? Ok, maybe a urinary tract infection or certain STDs like the clap might have been transmittable (theoretically) if you squirted the urine up your urethra, but I don't think you were planning on that.

[Kiwi]

im fairly sure you can catch hepititus from urine

[kerrisan]

I'd rather not discuss what could be in the urine because that could result in something , but there is the bizzare yet considerable possibility that another toddler will come and play in it/drink it/etc while Mummy is down the aisle getting a 12-pack of Coke. And then Mummy gets mad as us for having pee on the floor. Urine is just . . . not the same as plain old water.

[Tanizaki]

im fairly sure you can catch hepititus from urine

Hepatitis A and B, but not C. Of course, they can also be transmitted by tears. Again, this is theoretically possible if you ingested it. Mopping it up has almost no risk of infection, especially when it came from a little girl.

[Tanizaki]

I'd rather not discuss what could be in the urine because that could result in something , but there is the bizzare yet considerable possibility that another toddler will come and play in it/drink it/etc while Mummy is down the aisle getting a 12-pack of Coke. And then Mummy gets mad as us for having pee on the floor. Urine is just . . . not the same as plain old water.

Yes, and I agreed that urine and water are different, and that your manager should not have lied. I just wondered what you feared from the whiz.

[kerrisan]

I guess I fell victim to thinking that urine is "dirty." Still, I'd rather clean up regular water than pee!

[Dreamstalker]

Sterility aside (urine is only sterile as long as it's in the body IIRC), it's just icky.

[Barefootgirl]

I'd be quite happy to clean up pee - as long as i know its pee ! The key issue here is that the manager lied about the substance, not that eww its so gross that someone might haveto cleanup someone else's pee.

FWIW, I'd rather clean up a small child's pee than an adult's pee.

[kerrisan]

FWIW, I'd rather clean up a small child's pee than an adult's pee.

Why is that?

[Tanizaki]

Why is that?

Chances are that a child's urine is gonig to be cleaner than an adult's i.e. it probably will not be carrying the clap.

[kerrisan]

True, and I understand that picking up any diseases from the urine would be pretty difficult, but it's the IDEA of it. Not everybody knows that urine is sterile, and what if a customer had somehow found out? We have all heard of those hardheaded customers who insist that they are right, and somebody would have insisted that urine is diseased.

Well, the urine sure looked like water (child must have been very hydrated), and if I had just treated it like water it would have been fine, but still, you (or at least I) tend to go overboard when I have to think of a customer's wellbeing. Now, emotional health is THEIR problem . . .