We Should Have Been Fired
A teenage cleaning crew, a yellow VW Bug, and the sacred chaos of seventeen
Some memories smell like bleach and breadsticks.
Some hide in the hiss of a vacuum or the cold sting of winter air through a cracked window.
Some ride shotgun in a yellow Volkswagen Bug, rattling through the empty streets of Columbus before dawn.
We were seventeen.
Mike and I worked for a janitorial company that contracted with businesses all across Columbus: factories, warehouses, athletic clubs, and office buildings.
We arrived when everyone else left,
Cleaned what others didn’t see,
Left before the sun came up.
We didn’t drink, we didn’t smoke, our biggest rebellion was eating thirty-seven leftover breadsticks in one sitting and staging paintball wars with plastic guns.
But we laughed, loudly, often at ourselves.
And somewhere between mop buckets and buffing machines, we carved out a space to be completely, joyfully ridiculous.
The strangeness started early.
Our first staff meeting was held in a cramped office with a drop ceiling, flickering fluorescents, and a folding table topped with time cards and a coffee pot. Maybe a dozen of us sat shoulder to shoulder, most of them older, worn boots planted flat on the carpet.
The owner of the company, a petite woman in her fifties with kind eyes and a clipboard, welcomed us warmly.
Then she asked us to bow our heads.
Mike glanced at me. I shrugged. We bowed.
She prayed for safety, for our work, for grace.
And then, she pivoted.
“There are forces you can’t see,” she said. “When you’re out there driving to a job, the devil is watching. He wants to distract you. Harm you. Keep you from serving with faith.”
Mike shifted, leaned in. “What is happening?”
This wasn’t metaphor. To her, demons literally lurked along I-270. And we, two teenage janitors, had just enlisted in spiritual warfare without even knowing it.
We walked out holding our timecards and the uneasy feeling that maybe this job would be... different.
It was.
There was the Ohio State Athletic Club.
We didn’t clean the locker rooms, just the grand marble staircases, high ceilings, and echoing hallways. It was pristine and formal and way too nice to be trusting two high school kids with floor buffers and mops.
An older janitor who worked there full-time clued us in on the soda fountain: unlimited, ice cold, all we could drink. So we’d make a pit stop every shift, root beer, Sprite, the occasional suicide mix.
One night, late into a shift, long after the soda had worn off and hunger had settled in, we wandered into the commercial kitchen, hoping to find something, anything, to eat. No dinner, no snacks, just the gnawing ache of seventeen-year-old metabolisms on overdrive.
Near the industrial fridge, on a stainless steel prep counter, we spotted it: a steel bowl packed with factory-made, rock-hard breadsticks.
We cracked the lid and started eating. Thirty-seven of them, we think. Maybe more. They were terrible, crunchy, salty, flavorless logs, but they were ours. And they were hilarious.
We leaned against the counter, bellies temporarily full, mouths dry, and laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe. We wiped the counter and vanished like shadows.
The only evidence was the dull ache in our stomachs and the distant memory of garlic.
There was the shipping warehouse.
We weren’t supposed to go past the front offices, but one door was open. Inside, mountains of bubble wrap, cardboard tubes like jousting lances, bins of packing peanuts just begging to be launched into the air.
So we did what any seventeen-year-olds would do.
We built armor from bubble wrap. Sword-fought with cardboard lances. Rolled across the warehouse floor, popping our bubble wrap armor like knights in a wannabe Monty Python film shot on a twelve-dollar budget.
At one point, I laughed so hard I nearly peed myself, not ideal when you’ve duct-taped yourself into a cardboard exosuit.
Then, like always, we cleaned it all up. Every peanut. Every footprint. Every bit of tape.
That was the code. Make the mess. Then make it disappear.
There was the beige office complex.
I had just gotten a pair of early paintball guns for Christmas, flimsy plastic things that fired tiny red pellets with a soft thwop. Mike and I tied strips of cloth around our heads, painted with red suns like we were kamikaze warriors, which made absolutely no sense, but made perfect sense to us.
We took positions behind desks. Mike darted between cubicles. I crawled under the front receptionist's desk, the perfect sniper post.
That’s when we heard it.
Keys. A door unlocking.
A man stepped in, briefcase in hand.
He stopped. Looked around.
Saw me. Just me. Lying motionless under the desk, paintball gun in hand, red headband tied tight. No broken glass. No paint. Just an absurd tableau of teenage idiocy.
We stared at each other.
I slowly slid the gun out of sight.
He turned and walked out.
We never saw him again.
There was the Golden Goat.
Not a goat. Not gold. But magical.
A machine behind a strip mall that crushed cans and spit out coins like a Vegas slot machine.
Every place we cleaned, we gathered empties — soda, energy drinks, anything — stuffed them into black trash bags and tossed them in the back of Mike’s VW Bug, which always smelled like syrup and aluminum.
One night, after an extremely long shift, we were heading home, windows cracked to let the scent of stale cola drift out, when the red and blue lights lit up the rearview.
Mike pulled over. Killed the engine. We sat there, silent.
The officer’s footsteps crunched toward us.
He paused at Mike’s window.
He rolled it down.
Flashlight beam. Long look, the beam of light scraping over the backseat chock full of cleaning tools, vacuum cleaner, hoses, brooms, and two full trash bags of salvaged aluminum cans.
“What’s in the bags?”
“Cans,” Mike said, his voice a notch higher than usual. “We take them to the Golden Goat. It gives you money.”
The officer leaned in, took a deeper breath. The Bug smelled like a frat house floor — syrupy, fermented air and too many cleaning rags.
“You guys janitors?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Just finished our shift.”
He stared at us. Not angry. Not convinced. Just... waiting. Like he was giving us time to change our story.
Then he turned and walked back to his cruiser.
We sat in the car. Waiting.
Watching his silhouette shift and glow behind the windshield. The long pause of him running our plates. The engine idling too loud in the silence.
Mike tapped the steering wheel. I swallowed hard.
Finally, he returned.
Cracked a crooked smile. Not a warm one. More like a man who’d been seventeen once and barely survived it.
“Alright. Get home safe.”
We nodded.
He followed us for what felt like an eternity. We waited until the cruiser turned out of sight, then we exploded with laughter. The kind that leaves your lungs burning.
We weren’t troublemakers. Just seventeen. Stuck between spiritual warfare and soda-sticky backseats.
Because that job wasn’t just a paycheck, it was late-night drives in Mike’s yellow Bug. It was the sound of soda cans clinking in the backseat and the sweet, sticky smell that lingered. It was bubble wrap battles and unspoken loyalty.
Mike and I had been friends since fifth grade, but something about that season, the laughter, the mischief, the quiet teamwork of cleaning up every last mess, tightened the bond in ways only hindsight fully reveals.
He lives in Colorado now. We don’t talk much. But when we do, time folds in on itself. The jokes land the same. The cadence returns. It’s like climbing back into that yellow Bug, windows fogged, cans rattling, headlights cutting through the dark of some empty central Ohio street.
I miss him.
Not because he’s gone, but because we aren’t seventeen anymore.
I miss who I was when I was with him, lighter, unfiltered, fully present. Before ambition. Before bills. Before the world taught us to quiet down.
That job was chaos. And it was beautiful.
We should have been fired. But thank God we weren’t.
Did you ever have a job that shaped you in unexpected ways? A moment from your teenage years that still makes you laugh, or reminds you who you were becoming?
I’d love to hear your story.