Bathroom Cleaning in Less Than Ten Minutes

Once, a girl I had been trying to impress agreed to come over to my place. She would be over in about twenty minutes. I lived by myself, and somehow, over the course of the week I had avoided all forms of housekeeping, the result being, what usually happens when a male lives alone with no lover to protest his self-imposed squalor, a mess. Dishes overflowed from the sink, onto the counter and stove, weeks old spaghetti was pasted to the floor, laundry was everywhere, the flap of the garbage no longer opened because it was so full of trash, and worst of all the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. Towel fuzz covered the counter, the sink was water-stained, toothpaste-stained, and spit-stained, while the tub was blackened, and the toilet literally had something growing in it.

How, did it come to this?

It started, innocently enough, with a sweater tossed on the couch as the weather turned fair. Then a pair of socks discarded on the floor as I got ready for bed. A backpack quickly tossed in the hall as I ran to the bathroom. The few dishes in the sink were hardly worth the effort to bubble some water, and soon gathered an army of followers while the mail on the kitchen table surrounded itself with pals: magazines, books, and stationary, as if they couldn’t bear the solitude. Life, it seems, had been busy, as it always was when housekeeping got sacrificed to do other, more important, things. Twenty minutes seems like hardly enough time to reverse what had happened.

But what if you could somehow control time? ride it like a horse, pull on its reigns, and say Whoa, Girl…Steady! We’ve all experienced moments where time slows down to a crawl. Waiting for the bus in the cold, or in line at the grocery store, or for the weekend to begin at the office—these things all seem to take forever. While the opposite is also true, time sure does fly when you’re having fun.

People who play sports call it that being in the zone, while Buddhists call it being in the moment. It’s that instant where distractions disappear and all your mental and physical energy is pinpointed on the task at hand, and time doesn’t slow or or stop, but suddenly seems precious, like each second had the power to make great change. In the football game, time takes on a new meaning when in seconds The Winning Team switches roles with The Losing Team, back and forth, over and over, fighting over time, until the clock runs out. And when the ballet’s over, the players wake, as if from a dream, and wonder how it went by so quick.

Once, I tried an experiment to see how fast it took me to clean my bathroom. I set a timer and started. I filled a bucket with hot water and Mr. Clean, wiped down the counters, faucets, toilet, and sink. I cleaned the cabinets and wiped the grime from the handles. I scrubbed the toilet bowl with bleach, the tub with Comet. I changed the towels, cleaned the mirrors and toothbrush holder, and swept and mopped the floor. With my eye on the clock, this took about fifteen minutes. Which surprised me. I always thought Cleaning The Bathroom took at least thirty minutes and, to Clean The Whole House, practically the entire day. But that was without a timer ticking away and announcing the fact that time wasn’t going to slow down when my concentration drifted and I decided mid-way through wiping down the mirror that I needed some music, and half an hour later I blinked awake in front of my computer screen, iPod now ready with the best-playlist-ever, the Windex long forgotten and dried to the mirror.

But isn’t this the case? Don’t we need deadlines and goals to do things efficiently? Had I not been aware of the clock ticking away, I could easily have spent the entire evening Cleaning The Bathroom, caught in some housekeeping vortex, and end up with the same result.

My world record for Cleaning The Bathroom is six and a half minutes (and that’s doing a proper job, not cutting any corners). Maybe, with a lot of training, I could shave that number down to five minutes, but I don’t think I’ll bother. Under ten minutes is fine. The nice thing about it is you can find it practically anywhere. In the morning before you go to work, or before you go out in the evening, while you’re waiting for the pot of spaghetti to bubble, or the drive it takes someone to come over to your house.

Which brings me back to the Other Sex, getting ready and leaving her apartment, hopping in her car with my address written on a slip of paper. She matches the address to the numbers outside my building, finds a place to park on the street, pushes my name on the buzzer, and rides the elevator up to my floor. I answer the door and invite her in. She marvels at how clean it is. It’s spotless. For the past twenty minutes I cleaned and vacuumed and washed the dishes like the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels.

Most guys, the girl says, are such a mess.