Mistress of Disaster

The office I work in is situated in a corner of a large, steel framed machine shed. To get to my little corner of it, you have to zig-zag up two short (4-5 steps) flights of stairs, then you open the first door and step into a 6 foot hallway that leads you to the office door. Well, this little hallway, since it opens to the workshop, where they do all kinds of work on the machinery, tends to get pretty dirty. Ash from welders, CO2 dust from when they let something idle a long time, and dust that blows in from everywhere through the two main doors and so on. One day last week, I decided to really get it cleaned up good and borrowed the shop-vac to use on it instead of my little household Hoover that I use in the office. So I dragged the shop-vac up the two sets of stairs and sat the tank of it right inside the office door, fired it up and vacuumed away. I was very pleased with how well all the grime and dust and stuff was getting sucked up and when I stepped back to admire my handiwork, I reached up to turn off the switch. The sight inside the office was absolutely mortifying! Okay, maybe not mortifying, but if I had just looked up ONE time while I was vacuuming, I could have prevented the whole thing. Unbeknownst to me, the men had removed the bag from the vac and it was blowing everything I had just vacuumed out of the hallway into the office! A thick cloud of dust and grime was hanging in the air, and slowly settling down over everything everywhere.
It took me the rest of the afternoon and part of the next morning to get everything wiped off and cleaned up.
Joani stopped in the next day and complimented me with, “The office looks really nice.” I was just going to say “thanks,” but repented and confessed that my shop-vac adventure had necessitated the thorough cleaning.
But, hey, the entry hall is still clean as a whistle!