Ok, so let’s pick up where we left off last time. I promised I’d spill the rest of the beans — so here goes.

If you remember… I had just bleached the carpet in a main executive office of one of our biggest customers’ buildings. And, also, if you remember, we were cleaning that carpet because our customer had VIPs coming in the morning! And, finally, if you remember, the carpet looked horrible… actually “ruined” — some of the brown carpet was now bleached “yellow,” while other areas were still brown… creating what I’d describe as “a huge, swirling mess of brown, yellow and white!” … which, by the way, on a side note, made me feel like I didn’t spray the “protectant” on the right way… but that’s another story… lol… anyway…

Yeah, so THAT about sums it up.

Ok, so after the initial shock wore off… here’s what we came up with. I bet you won’t guess — AND, by the way, I DON’T recommend this. It’s simply what two young, tired, inexperienced guys, new to the cleaning business, came up with — at 1 AM:

We decided to try to “go back over” the carpet with the extractor… using a bleach-water solution… in an effort to… you guessed it… create an evenly, uniformly bleached look!

No kidding. And I’m certainly not recommending it — but, to be honest, it “sort of” worked.

The reason I say “sort of” is because you couldn’t hide the fact that something was, at the very least, different… but not necessarily “bad” different. By the time we were done, it was certainly a different color than the rest of the carpet in the hall, etc.… BUT, if you looked at just the carpet in just that one office, on its own — well, it looked, I’d say… evenly “yellow!!”

Ok, stop laughing. Actually, don’t… we deserve it.

I’m not making excuses, and we certainly “owned up” to the mistake by calling first thing in the morning to explain and apologize. The story remarkably ends with the customer actually — incredibly — being understanding… saying, if I remember correctly, that… “It didn’t look THAT bad, just very clean,” or something.

We offered to do whatever was necessary to “make things right,” but in the end they said — if you can imagine this… NOT to worry about it. God bless them.

Ok, I can’t leave without at least repeating the lesson we learned from that experience: “Label Everything!” You have to know for certain what’s in every container in your warehouse or the janitorial closets in your customers’ buildings.

Discover the Guru in YOU,
Dan