Wringing out a wet cloth

At JPC, all the workers clean the office together for 15 minutes from 8:50 on every Monday morning. We vacuum the carpet on the floor, clean the toilet and we wet a cloth and wring it out before wiping our desks. However, I realised that wringing out the cloth after wetting it is not always a standard thing to do. The other day, I asked one of our staff to wipe the desk and found that all the desks were quite badly wet. I did not really notice it at that time but when another staff member did the same job, the same thing happened: the cloth was not wrung properly.

When I was a primary school kid, most children were using cloths at cleaning time, I assumed everyone would wring the cloth out. In some countries they do not use cloth (some non-Japanese staff in our office), and some young Japanese staff have never used them before.

In Japan, now that vacuum cleaners are the norm in every household, I guess not many children have experience in using a cloth at home. Apart from cloth to be used on the floor, the only thing which needs wringing is a rag to wipe the table. So the simple thing of wringing out the cloth is a thing in the past for young children in this country.

When I was a child, because both of my parents were working, I quite often had to help them with cleaning. Also, we visited our neighbours more often, saw their ways of cleaning, and got a bit confused when it was not always the same way as ours. Sometimes I learned a new way to wring out the cloth differently looking at how my friends were doing it. We seemed to have had more opportunity to see how people cleaned.

However, now most young people are too busy playing on the internet or with their mobile phones, they are not watching what their parents are doing. Compared to old times, we have less contact with our neighbours, so we have less chance to see how they clean their houses and steal their technique. Cleaning and other house work are carried from adults to children naturally through everyday life but this seems to be changing now.

Then, is it us adult’s responsibility to teach this to our children? To be honest, I have never taught my children how to wring out the cloth. I guess you have to repeat the same process over and over until they learn how to do housework. Adults have to be patient. It requires great patience on our side.

So I asked my children to wring out the cloth. Because they could not wring it out well, I decided to take this opportunity to teach them how to do it. Unfortunately, with my boy’s lack of grip strength, I got mad and impatient. We ended up in a nasty mood. No, it did not go well. In the end, I yelled to them, “I can’t stand it! I’ll finish this myself. You just go away and finish your homework or whatever!”

Maybe teachers should make this homework, then parents and children will think this is something they have to do?

Sorry, this issue turned out to be some old man complaining…


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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
3B YS-Building, 1-2-2 Botan, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955