This product is suitable for industrial and institutional applications.
My parents’ house has, at the bottom of the stairs near the front door, a mountain of shoes that even Hillary and Norgay would find intimidating. There are dozens of them. The pile is beyond the help of any shoe rack and continues to grow. I have a theory that entire shoes are devoured by the pile itself and their replacements only add to the chaos.
I own three pairs of shoes: dress shoes for formal occasions and the times when I used to work in-person, sandals for Saturdays between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and boots for all other occasions. (Boots do get hot in the summer, but suffering is a virtue.) I promised myself I would never allow such a state of affairs as the shoe mountain in my own living space, but we all have our weaknesses.
I came to the realization that I suffer from my own, similar crisis when I found myself wondering why my apartment did not have a linen closet. I live in a thoughtfully-designed building, and it seemed strange to me that the architect would neglect to include such a feature. A brief investigation revealed that I do, in fact, have a linen closet, but it has no room for linens because it is filled with my own vice: cleaning supplies.
I appreciate that there is an irony to having dozens of bottles of cleaning chemicals and microfiber cloths and mops cluttering up a living space, but they build up over time and the situation is now beyond human control.
My parents gave me a package of detergent pods, a few cylinders of disinfectant wipes, and a bottle of a citrus chemical called Goo Gone when I left for college and I was off to the races.
One thing led to another and I found recently that I had no space to fit a hard-won package of Clorox wipes I had tracked down. They were my first new Clorox wipes since I left home for college six years ago. I keep a clean living space, but it is also small, and I could not possibly hope to use cleaning products at the rate I accumulate them.
The collection is stunning in its breadth and quantity. The current supply includes enough detergent for 190 loads of laundry, sufficient hand sanitizer and bleach to survive three more pandemics without even the slightest concern, and more multi-purpose cleaners than can ever be justified.
At the back of the closet sit products that have been thrust into irrelevance by changes in circumstance. I have not used fabric softener in years (again, suffering is a virtue), but a bottle of the stuff sits next to a quantity of limescale remover that, while appalling on its face, makes perfect sense to any person who has ever lived with Kalamazoo’s municipal water supply. Similarly, I continue to keep a bottle of the only chemical that could manage dorm bathroom mold to my satisfaction but which I have (mercifully) not since found occasion to use.
I do not know what caused me to be this way. Perhaps it was growing up among the notoriously clean Dutch of West Michigan. Certainly, my summer job in maintenance at a seminary founded by the Dutch did not help.
Perhaps it is part of the hereditary package for me. I come from generations of men who take recreational trips to the hardware store with no list and in search of a cheap solution to problems they did not previously know they had. On a family vacation in which we had only six hours out of our whole lives to be in Paris, one of them was spent in a hardware store so that my father could buy a metric measuring tape.
It was in this spirit that I found myself last weekend at Hamtramck Hardware, a tiny hardware store in Hamtramck (as the name suggests) that sells all sorts of wonderful things. I was sold on it when I went there with a friend to purchase a drain cleaner and walked out with a plastic bottle sealed within two more plastic bags that had a label with a skull and crossbones warning of “sulfuric eruptions.” Any place that sells such a product to twenty-somethings without asking questions is my kind of operation.
I went in last weekend with the vague sense that I wanted to purchase a new showerhead. I walked out instead with a gallon of what I believed to be a multi-purpose cleaner.
I have a particular weakness for cleaning products that I can buy in enormous quantities for very little money. Again, I suspect this is a side-effect of my upbringing among the Dutch. I do not need a gallon of multi-purpose cleaner, but there is a certain romance to buying such an unfathomable quantity of something for eight dollars that makes it irresistible.
With the linen closet at capacity, I placed the mighty jug in the center of the dining table when I got home. Some people reserve this space for flowers or family heirlooms or bowls of fruit. I do not. Make no mistake — my dining table is not a messy place where things accumulate. The gallon of cleaner had earned a place of central honor in my home on its own merits.
I take great joy in reading the labels of cleaning products, and this was my dinner activity. It was as I ate my gnocchi that comes frozen in a bag that I discovered I had not purchased a gallon of ordinary multi-purpose cleaner, but of highly-concentrated industrial degreaser. This is clearly listed on the front of the package, but I was so giddy with the price that I did not read any part of the label when I found it in the store.
One part of the product to 30 parts of water, the jug promises, is enough to clean up spills of hydraulic fluids. 1:10 is only appropriate in cases of “thick soot” and “tough soils lodged in porous surfaces.” For general cleaning, the listed ratio is 1:40.
My studio apartment is mostly free of thick soot and hydraulic fluids. It is 400 square feet and the main contaminants are dust and occasional butter stains.
Some quick math reveals that this jug alone is enough to deep-clean over 300 bathrooms, many acres of kitchen countertop, or nearly a dozen chimneys with “thick soot.” I could probably pour the bottle into an Olympic swimming pool and the result might still be strong enough for mopping my apartment’s floor and cleaning the kitchen counter.
I am too proud, of course, to get rid of my prize. That would be unthinkable. Instead, I have accepted that I will carry the jug around for decades as I use teaspoons of it at a time. It will move with me like some kind of treasured heirloom from house to house. My descendants had better not be hoping for shoes after I am gone. Instead, they will be getting the better part of a gallon of industrial degreaser.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
"The Dial Comes to Town" by the Bell Telephone Company.
It has been a weird week. I have no idea why I watched this or how I came upon it, but I find it charming. I watched a lot of strange mid-century instructional films when I wrote my senior thesis on cold war civil defense, and, for what it is worth, this has the best character development of any I have ever seen.
“Ponchielli’s ‘Dance of the Hours’ is ‘Perfect’ Pandemic Music” with Fran Hoepfner on Here and Now.
This is the latest of my attempts to force classical music on readers of the Newsletter. Fran Hoepfner is another Kalamazoo College graduate, so you know that everything she does and says is good and right. Like large bottles of cleaning chemicals, I have a weakness for any public radio walkthrough of a classical piece, and I am a big fan of “Dance of the Hours.”
This is also a good gateway to her excellent “Classical Music Hour with Fran” column (may it rest in peace).