Nickel and Dimed p.92
Let's talk about shit, for example. It happens, as the bumper sticker says, and it happens
to a cleaning person every day. The first time I encountered a shit-stained toilet as a maid, I was shocked by the sense of unwanted intimacy. A few hours ago, some well-fed butt
was straining away on this toilet seat, and now here I am wiping up after it. For those
who have never cleaned a really dirty toilet, I should explain that there are three kinds of
shit stains. There are remnants of landslides running down the inside of toilet bowls.
There are the splash-back remains on the underside of toilet seats. And, perhaps most
repulsively, there's sometimes a crust of brown on the rim of a toilet seat, where a turd
happened to collide on its dive to the water. You don't want to know this? Well, it's not
something I would have chosen to dwell on myself, but the different kinds of stains
require different cleaning approaches. One prefers 'those that are interior to the toilet
bowl, since they can be attacked by brush, which is a kind of action-at-a-distance
weapon. And one dreads the crusts on the seats, especially when they require the
intervention of a Dobie as well as a rag.

Or we might talk about that other great nemesis of the bathroom cleaner-pubic hair. I
don't know what it is about the American upper class, but they seem to be shedding their
pubic hair at an alarming rate. You find it in quantity in shower stalls, bathtubs, Jacuzzis,
drains, and even, unaccountably, in sinks. Once I spent fifteen minutes crouching in a
huge four-person Jacuzzi, maddened by the effort of finding the dark little coils
camouflaged against the eggplant-colored ceramic background but fascinated by the
image of the pubes of the economic elite, which must by this time be completely bald.