It's interesting how your memory gets jogged by little things.
I was washing my hands at work when I noticed that someone had watered down the liquid soap. I was instantly taken back several years ago when I was an MS given a cleaning assignment at an assembly taking place in the assembly hall. I remember that brothers were assigned to guard and dispense cleaning supplies only to brothers in charge of their respective departments. Then that brother handed them out to his "employees" and we had to answer for every bottle, rag, mop, broom borrowed. The liquid cleaning supplies were kept in plain white spray bottles with hand written labels. It didn't take long to realize that these supplies were not much good. It took more elbow grease than cleaner to do the job. A brother who had been in cleaning for some time told me the dirty little secret how they bought name brand cleaning supplies and then cut them with water to stretch the product out further.
One year I was assigned the kitchen to clean. The stainless steel was impossible to clean with the stuff they gave us. I went to the cleaning supplies overseer to ask for something more powerful. He sent me to the Assembly Hall overseer, the guy that actually lived on site and oversaw everything about the place. He took me to a locked closet, pulled out a ring of keys and opened the closet. Inside the closet were the cleaning products in their original store bought bottles. The overseer looked at me and said that this was a very special cleaner. It was very strong stuff. A little goes a long way. Use it sparingly. I laughed, because on the shelves were just plain old cleaners that you can buy at Wal-Mart. Nothing special. I laughed, expecting him to laugh along too, like he got me on a good joke, but no. He was dead serious. He looked at me with a stern look, as if to say, "I'm not sure you are responsible enough to handle this special cleaner". I had to sign out the bottle. I had to go use it , bring it right back and then he scratched my name off the check out list.
The last day of the assembly we needed to wash out some cans outside. We went out on the back dock to the outside hose bibb. The faucet handle was missing. How did that happen? Who would steal a faucet handle? We went back to report it and whoever we told said that it was on purpose. We needed to go see the Assembly Hall overseer to "check out" the faucet handle. We hunted him down, he took us to his office and locked inside his desk drawer was the faucet handle. We had to sign for it, use it, bring it back to him and him only.
Here we were, in Jehovah's place of worship and we were watering down the cleaning supplies and hiding faucet handles. I remember thinking after that assembly, if we are to give Jehovah our best, how can you justify watering down cleaning supplies used on his place of worship? Any of you that have worked cleaning at an assembly hall know just how anal those guys were about how clean everything had to be. Yet, they gave us inferior products to give them a superior cleaning job than what we would do at home. That assembly left a very bad taste in my mouth. I was very frustrated after that assembly. I remember all of the issues around the cleaning but I couldn't tell you one thing about any of the talks or experiences.
