Spotting Ben before he starts his shift I ask him how his week is going. 'Good. But it's only Monday!' He laughs and throws me a smile. On Saturday I ask him the same question. He runs his hand through his shock of dark, wavy hair. 'Good. Only one day to go!' The smile is tired, but still there.
Ben is one of the service workers whose legions roam office buildings long after the office workers have gone home for the day. Every evening as the office workers finish, they begin: the cleaners, the tidy-uppers, the near-invisible army of people who pick up the day's mess.
They collect balls of paper that didn't quite make the bin, strap on vacpacs to suck up the sugar spilled from lunchtime coffees, and mop away shreds of paper towel that have been ground into the toilet tiles by loafer clad feet.
The office workers return the next morning to find their workplace pristine. They take this their due: in this world some clean and some are cleaned for, and the latter do not contemplate the former, other than to cast aspersions upon them when a bin is found unemptied.
For four years Ben has cleaned my office. On a good night he can clean the whole building in two hours. On a bad night, if the toilet has been vandalised or a child has smeared cake across the lobby, it can take three.
One night after knockoff I stop for a chat. He mentions a second job. And a third.
I tell him he deserves a break. He laughs. 'I just had one. I didn't have a main job for two months. I spent every day looking for a job. That was enough holiday. Now I want to work as much as I can.' On his 'holiday' Ben cleaned our office every evening, and worked all weekend.
The average full time employee in Australia works 44 hours a week. The people in the office Ben cleans pull 35. During his busiest weeks Ben slogs through over 70.
This is an improvement. For seven months while he was studying his working day was truly Herculean. By 3.00am he was out of bed and pushing a vacuum cleaner around an office building. At 8.30am he arrived at a mechanics workshop. Six hours later, his hands black with grease, he went home for a 15 minute lunch before heading into the city to sit