My name is Jimmy Gruninger, from West Virginia, by way of Michigan,
by way of Europa. Starfleet, chief petty officer. Been in for over twenty years,
currently chief custodian here aboard the USS Knoxville.
I enlisted when I was eighteen, I’ve worked custodial crews pretty much ever since.
Mostly on starships. A while back I did get posted to Starbase 83, which I hated every
second of and requested a transfer after six months because it was planetside, and I mean,
I signed on with Starfleet, you know what I’m saying?
If I wanted to work on a planet, I’d have stayed on Earth and joined the Navy.
I’m just kiddin’ around. I’d never have joined the Navy — those poor bastards,
most people don’t even know they still exist!
No disrespect, if any of you all know someone in the Navy. . . .
You do? Who’s that? . . . Your mom? . . . How long has she been
missing? . . . Ha ha ha! I’m only messin’ with you. . . . She’s not actually missing, is she?
I love this job. At this point of my career, I really have nothing to complain about. I
basically get to be as hands-on or hands-off as I want. Everybody always jokes about, you know,
“Oh, who cleans the holodecks?” but the truth is, most of that is automated anyway. All we
really need to do is change the filters every so often — and if the X.O. is breaking in a
new batch of junior officers, most of the time we don’t even have to do that.
Oop, hold on — better close this down. I like coming up here on my breaks. You can’t beat
the view. But you’re not supposed to have the door up while we’re at warp.
One of the officers catches me and I’ll never hear the end of it. “The rules
exist to keep us all safe and they apply to everyone” — as if I didn’t know that.
If there’s anyone onboard a starship who don’t ever need to hear the safety lecture,
it’s the custodians. You know what I mean?
We see it all. When someone tries to beam back to the ship through an ion storm and all that
arrives on the transporter pad is a pile of wet hamburger and hair, guess who has to clean it up?
Well, not me — I get one of the kids to do it. But, you get the point.
Worst mess I ever had to clean up personally? That would be about fifteen — no, fourteen
years ago. I was on the USS Endeavour, which — ordinarily I don’t really care where they post me,
as long as it’s not somewhere planetside like I mentioned, because the job’s the
same wherever you are, but serving on a ship like the Endeavour? Not everybody gets to do that. So,
that was kinda cool for me. I’ve got a little model of it on my desk back in my office,
the Endeavour. All the ships I’ve served on, that’s the only one I’ve got.
Anyway. Fourteen years ago, I’m on the Endeavour, I’ve been there a few months. We get called down
to the starboard nacelle tube. A couple of crewmen from the exobiology department had
been on a landing party to collect plants from this planet we visited, and apparently while
they were down there they got exposed to some . . . substance? Chemical? Whatever it was,
they weren’t thinking straight and they got it into their heads that they were in love,
and that they were about to be transferred to different ships and they’d never be together,
so, the state they were in, they decided the only thing to do was kill themselves, which they
did by going down to the starboard nacelle tube, holding hands, and jumping into the plasma stream.
Normally, they would have been vaporized instantly. But as luck would have it,
those two went down to the nacelle tube while engineering was running the warp engines through
a maintenance cycle, so the plasma stream wasn’t at full strength, and instead of vaporizing them,
it just sort of pureed them into a pink slush and flung ‘em out in all directions.
Didn’t make any difference to them — the stream was still hot enough that they were dead pretty
much the instant they hit it — they didn’t suffer or anything. But I guess my detail drew
the short straw that day, because when we got to that nacelle tube there was creamed crewman
on the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all over the computer consoles and the instruments. It
was . . . indescribable. It was the worst, most disgusting mess I’ve ever had to clean up. It
was the filthiest thing I’d seen since that time I took a tour of the cleanest ship in the Navy.
No, but . . . I say things like that sometimes just to take the edge off, you know?
As good as this job’s been to me and as much as I love it, things do get pretty
grim sometimes. All that chunky salsa splashed on the wall, that used to be a person. Two people.
And even when there’s not such a gruesome scene left behind, it can get . . .
While I was on the Endeavour, we lost one of our senior medical officers.
The ship had been boarded by a group of Felnodixian separatists who wanted
to assassinate the Viceroy of Ankanostia, who we were transporting to a diplomatic
conference . . . somewhere. They somehow managed to beam in through our shields and
ambushed the Viceroy in the corridor, but his private security detail was with him
and they only winged him. The separatists ran off, security, including most of the Viceroy’s people,
chased after them. Medical team shows up in the corridor to treat the Viceroy’s wound and while
they’re working on him, one of the separatists comes back around the corner, fires his disruptor,
the doctor jumps in front of the Viceroy and takes the hit and . . . Gone. Just like that.
She wanted a burial in space, but she’d been vaporized. So, when they had her funeral and
launched her torpedo, there was nothing in the case except an air filter — [chokes back sob] —
because that’s all of her we could recover.
Doctor Alicia Valdez. That was her name.
. . . No, wait, it was Doctor Tina Russell. Alicia Valdez was the xenoanthropologist who
died of Klingon chlamydia. I helped clean up after that one, too. Oof.
Klingon chlamydia and human chlamydia . . . they are not the same.
[Tegey (Comm):] Tegey to Chief Gruninger.
Hang on — Yes, sir?
[Tegey (Comm):] We had a containment field failure
in science lab three. Can we get someone down here to clean it up?
Right away.
[Tegey (Comm):] Okay. Thank you.
Just one more second — Gruninger to Burleson.
[Burleson (Comm)]: Yes, sir?
Clean-up in science lab three. Standard kit should be fine.
[Burleson (Comm)]: Yes, sir.
Oh, hey.
[Burleson (Comm)]: Yes, sir?
After you’re done, can you stop by the galley and ask whoever’s on duty to make me an egg sandwich?
[Burleson (Comm)]: Yes, sir.
Thank you.
Rank has its privileges.
Well, let me see what I can show you . . . Here are a few tools of the trade. This is a type I
molecular scrubber — that’s good for phaser burns. And here’s a type II — also good for phaser burns.
These are oxidizing nanocrystals — very good for removing stains from carpeting, if you get there
in time. This is what Crewman Burleson is using to clean up that spill in science lab three. Or
at least it’s what he should be using. Burleson’s one of my new kids. Still learning the ropes. He’s
a lot of fun, though. Easy to prank. Incredibly gullible. Super nice — well, he’s from Utah.
This one here is my favorite. This is a plumbing phaser.
Disintegrates soft organic matter. Good for unclogging toilets. And it doesn’t just work
on feces — it’s great for hair clogs, too. I found that out when I was serving on the Perseus.
The captain had this thing about always being on the bridge, even when she wasn’t
scheduled to be on duty, so she would shower in the private head in the ready room. And
this one time she got exposed to some kinda weird radiation that made her hair fall out,
but it would only happen, like, one part of her body at a time. So, the hair on top of her head
falls out — shower drain gets clogged, I get called in with the plumbing phaser. Next day,
all the hair on her chest falls out — shower drain gets clogged again, back I come with the
plumbing phaser. And it goes on all week like this — armpit hair one day, pubes the next,
then all the hair on her legs. I never got called to the bridge so many times my whole career!
Captains are odd ducks, though. I figured that much out. And that includes the captain
of the Knoxville. He got promoted to this command about six months after I got here,
and practically the first thing he does is have a fully functional galley installed on
deck eight. Like a restaurant quality kitchen. Which might sound neat at first — kinda quirky,
kinda quaint, ya know? But day to day, that place is a maintenance nightmare. There’s
always something that leaked, or got stained, or got burned. And it’s open to everyone on board,
but the captain’s the only one who ever uses it. Everyone else uses the replicators. There’s
a cooking staff who work full shifts every week and usually only cook three meals a
day. Maybe a little more if the captain wants a snack. That’s why sometimes I’ll
ask ‘em to make me something just for the hell of it. To give ‘em something to do.
It’s not like they need the practice — they know their stuff. Especially Joanne — she makes one
hell of an egg sandwich. I don’t know what all she does to it, but there’s no replicating that.
I don’t want to make it sound too easy. The job does have its challenges. We’re out here
in deep space. Weird shit happens. I told you about those two crewmen on the Endeavour who
got it into their heads to kill themselves by jumping into the plasma stream in the nacelle
tube? I’ve got an old buddy I’ve known since basic training, and he was on the custodial
crew of the . . . uh . . . the Ulysses, maybe? I forget, doesn’t matter — one of
the galaxy class ships. And, they had someone who killed himself the same way, by jumping
into the plasma stream. Only when he did it, it was running full blast and he was vaporized.
Why did he kill himself? I think he’d just heard that his son was getting married to someone in the
Navy. . . . I’m getting to why he killed himself. It turns out, back when that ship was being built
someone on the work crew with telepathic abilities had caught his girlfriend cheating on him,
so he killed the girlfriend and her lover, chucked their bodies into the plasma stream to
get rid of them, and then jumped in himself, but when he was vaporized it somehow left a
psychic echo in the walls of the nacelle tube, and it turned out the crewman who killed himself
while my friend was posted there all those years later had been driven to it by that.
So. I’ve been at this a long time, but I don’t know which one of these to use to get
the psychic echo of a murder/suicide out of a wall. . . . Maybe that one.
So. I always forget how other people see my job, you know? I’m always surprised when I meet someone
and tell them what I do and they ask me to explain the appeal of it, because to me it’s obvious.
It has its ups and downs like any other job, sometimes it's gross, sometimes it’s upsetting.
But it doesn’t require a lot of high level training. There’s skill involved, but it’s
mostly stuff you learn on the job and get better at with experience. There’s not a lot of math.
And it’s a humble job, but it’s also an important one, and I take a lot of professional pride in my
work. I say to these kids who work for me all the time, you know, the officers like to tell people
these ships clean themselves, but they only say that because we’re so good at what we do.
And what the officers don’t know won’t hurt ‘em. Usually, I mean.
If Lieutenant Valdez had known that Klingon had chlamydia, she’d probably still be alive.
Hey, there’s young Mr. Burleson! Thank you.
Best egg sandwich in Starfleet. Who was working? Was it Joanne? . . . Aww, really? Miguel? Did he
make it how I like? . . . What’d you get? . . . Weren’t you hungry? . . . Well, go back and
get ‘em to make you something! . . . So, take a break. . . . I’m saying it’s okay. . . . Go
get ‘em to make you something to eat and take a break. I’ll call you if I need you. . . .
Don’t thank me — thank Miguel if he remembers to season the damn thing.
You’re welcome!
. . .
Oh, Jesus . . . How do you not season eggs?
Better. . . . Fucking Miguel . . .