Good Clean Fun

I work at a dry cleaners in the Germantown area. I have been working there for about 2 years and it has proven to be a very simple job and one that works well with my school schedule. Easy money. I am a CSA. My duties include helping customers, writing up tickets (i.e. describing each article of clothing and pricing it), tagging clothes, and checking pockets. This proves to be the best part of the job because I often find that the lazy housewives and their careless husbands leave money, change, etc. that I happily put in my own pocket, a finder’s fee if you will. But money is not the only thing that our customers forget to remove. I have discovered a wide array of miscellaneous, disgusting, interesting, and disturbing paraphernalia left behind in the depths of this dirty laundry. Most of our clientele are middle aged/aging successful people so one of the most common items to discover in a pocket are drugs, legal and illegal. Viagra proves to be the most common pill, but I have found nitrates, valium, xanax, and hundreds of unidentifiable pills of varying shapes, colors, and sizes. We (my co-worker and I) can choose to save these pills in an envelope and return them to the customer when he or she returns to pick up their cleaning or just toss them. I have found narcotics like cocaine and even a little marijuana here and there. But drugs are only the tip of the iceberg. We find plenty of filthy things too: handfuls of cigarette butts, used snot rags, waxy ear plugs, combs with hair in them, condoms (unused thank god), random trash, chewed gum, bloody tissues, and dirty thongs. Needless to say I wash my hands many, many times during my shift. I have discovered bank statements, credit cards, drivers licenses, plane tickets, foreign money from all over the world, blank checks, golf tees, bullets, love letters, receipts, I.D. badges, pens, pencils, toothpicks, chapstick, chewing gum packets, candy, the list goes on forever. We do return important things like the credit cards and drivers licenses, but I am not going to put a customer’s dirty underwear and old concert stubs into an envelope and save it for them. No, I am just going to throw it away. This should serve as a lesson to anyone visiting their local dry cleaners: CHECK YOUR DAMN POCKETS!