“To be fair, Pam said, the boss had only been paying the regulars for two hours a day, which wasn’t enough: there was a kitchenette and a separate toilet upstairs with the offices, too. Two hours would be just enough time to wash the cups and plates and put them away, and give the toilets a quick once-over; to do the place properly you’d need four hours at least. Shelley knew what it was like if you had a job like this: you got your regular routine going, and then that was all you saw; you played your music and went into a kind of dream, wiping and sweeping, until you hardly knew what you were doing, just going through the motions. But she wasn’t the sort of person who took on this kind of work as a regular thing. She had a job at a school as a lunchtime supervisor. She wasn’t such a fool, either—she knew that, somewhere like this, if they saw that you were keeping it clean in two hours they’d cut you down to an hour and a half. Why should you care whether the place was as filthy as hell?”
Tessa Hadley, from the story Friendly Fire
The New Yorker, February 4, 2008