The Legendary Janitor

Chapter 30: A Fan of Fishing

But of course, Fu Hao Xin wasn't here right now, and they had already agreed to meet again the next morning, so for now Di Tou had other things to worry about.

"Hmm, there still isn't any work schedule. Do I just… Go out and start sweeping things? What the hell does a janitor even need to do? Are the toilets…" Di Tou felt a lump go down his throat, "my jurisdiction too? F*ck it, I'll go check out the shed first and worst comes to worst I'll just posture for a bit."

Dismissing the scroll, Di Tou left the room and went over into the adjoined courtyard, making his way straight to the small shed. Inside the shed there was a collection of various tools, ranging from mops and brooms to rags and fishing poles. Quite a lot of fishing poles in fact.

Looking at the inordinate ratio of fishing poles to cleaning tools Di Tou felt his eye twitch, "F*ck that old man really knew how to enjoy his job huh?"

Looking at this, Di Tou felt much more relieved though, as it didn't look like most of the tools were overused, so it seemed like… maybe this was a job he could get by simply by posturing? After all, it was hard to imagine Mu Di Bai actually going around and cleaning the entire campus on his own. And if he had so much time to fish, it shouldn't be too busy of a job, right?

Thinking back to his [Guidance] page and the first quest which involved raising the efficiency of sweeping leaves to 50% or above, and seeing that it was Autumn and leaves were beginning to fall. Di Tou decided to start with that.

But then when inspecting the closet… Di Tou couldn't find anything that looked like a rake that he was familiar with. In fact, most of the tools, while they seemed similar in appearance and were the same in function to modern appliances, were all much less handy to use.

For instance, a shovel. The modern shovel is designed in a way to either carry a larger amount of material with greater ease, or to better break into the ground, and to allow the user to exert more force with less effort. Even things like the handle, which seem rather marginal, are all comforts that a lot of olden tools didn't have.

The shovel in the shed before Di Tou on the other hand, would at best be a triangular head with a rather firm bamboo pole attached to it, if he was really lucky there would be a cloth tied around the pole for the user to hold onto. If Di Tou tried using such a shovel the same way he would use one in modern times, he'd find his hands quickly scratched up from friction, and his efficiency rather low.

Eventually Di Tou decided upon a large straw broom that he had seen the maintenance workers at the Beijing Olympics use, while he imagined it was in part for theatrical use, if a modern event had their workers using it, Di Tou figured it shouldn't be too impractical.

While he was at the shed, he also grabbed two rags and a basin he wanted to bring back into the room, after all it was still rather dirty and some proper cleaning tools would help significantly. After all, if it didn't matter where Di Tou was cleaning, it only made sense to prioritize his place of living first right?

Leaving the rags in the bowl outside the door, Di Tou moved back into the courtyard with the straw broom. There were only three trees in the courtyard, two of which were situated towards the corner of the courtyard, and one nearer to the center of the courtyard towering over the stone table.

The trees had already turned to beautiful shades of orange and yellow and begun shedding their leaves, although at the moment there wasn't too much of a mess to clean up yet, as it seemed the autumn season had just begun.

Lifting the straw broom Di Tou tried to sweep away the leaves under the table first, but when he did so he was obstructed by the large frame of the broom and ended up knocking the stick of the broom into the table repeatedly, while he found that the straw broom head was having difficulty picking up the leaves that were under any low edges or near corners.

Another thing that Di Tou didn't particularly realize was that the straw broom was rather heavy, in fact if Di Tou had tried to lift it the night before, it was likely he would have difficulty even dragging the broom on the ground, but as he had gotten stronger the brooms weight felt effectively normal to Di Tou.

Thinking about it for a moment, Di Tou decided to just roughly sweep out the leaves under the table for now and get any stragglers by hand afterwards. Sweeping the leaves out Di Tou ran into another problem…

Where was he going to sweep the leaves? While he could just pile them up in a corner, that wouldn't be a long term solution as the wind would blow down the piles, and as the season continued more and more leaves would accumulate until even if Di Tou was making piles there wouldn't be room for any additional leaves.

At the end of the day, Di Tou didn't know where the waste disposal was… And even if he did, at the moment he didn't have any bags to put the leaves in, so unless he wanted to make a trip carrying an armful of leaves every couple of minutes it seemed like he had to re-think the process.

Leaning the broom on the ground, Di Tou went back to the shed and rummaged around for a bit before finding a coarse cloth bag squished under a pile of bricks. The bag was rather large in size - big enough to engulf Di Tou's entire person.

But the bag, perhaps in the process of Di Tou unearthing it, had a large rip in it halfway up, so effectively only half the bag could be used at the moment if Di Tou wanted to avoid any leakage.

Sighing, Di Tou realized that he probably couldn't finish this job today, but figured he could at least try and start to see what his standard was based off of the rating of the mandate.

Bringing the cloth back over to one of the corners of the courtyard under one of the trees, Di Tou splayed it open so that it would be easier to throw leaves in it.

Returning to the straw broom, Di Tou started herding the leaves over to the corner of the courtyard that the bag was at.