TRAUMA & ACCIDENT CLEANING
boys in blue. He said: “For the more extreme cases we do have to work with the police. We’ve got a specialist sales consultant that mainly runs that side of the business, and we’re very much in conjunction with the police – literally as they’re walking out, we’re walking in very often.
“We do have to maintain a good relationship with them, and obviously if we did something wrong or weren’t professional with our job, we would lose that side of the business, so we’ve got an exceptionally good working relationship with many of the police services, and they often get us in to do other stuff, so there’s quite a few interesting bits and pieces that go on in the background.”
So what is it about specialist cleaning that attracted Luke to Rentokil in the first place? When he joined the company nine years ago as a Pest Technician, he was coming from a background in forensics, which certainly helped from a hygiene perspective, but he revealed that it was actually his work in television that first led him to the company.
“I was doing work in television for a while filming wildlife documentaries, and one of the ones that we did was called ‘Pests from Hell’ for National Geographic. In that, I was filming a guy that is an expert in pest control. I was doing the sound at the time, so I was listening to all this stuff and I just found it thoroughly interesting. And because I was freelancing and was out of work, this job came up really close to me at Rentokil and I thought ‘I’ve just listened to this and I found it really interesting’, so that’s how I got into the job,” he said.
“But I’ll be honest, I only expected to be doing this until the next TV job came up, but I absolutely loved it, I loved the interaction with the people and like many people you speak to here, you never expected to stay, but a lot of them have spent their whole careers at Rentokil.”
And while there are many elements of the job that are quite nasty, Luke said that, when dealing with suicides and other trauma clean-ups, one thing that he finds particularly interesting is the insight that you get into these people’s lives.
48 | Tomorrow’s Cleaning September 2015
When asked about any stand-out experiences, he said: “There are a couple. Probably the one that I would refer to is a suicide that I went out to early in my career in the hygiene side, and literally this guy one day, he got up, went downstairs, wrote a note to his wife and went into the garage – the guy was about 50 or 60 – and he’s shot himself in the head. It was a big white garage door, it was inside, and I don’t need to describe the scene that we encountered when we got there.
“And there were many things around this that struck me; one was the fact that we were dealing with his wife, just an hour after this man had taken his life, and she was there saying ‘do you want a cup of tea?’ So while you’ve got the gore of the scene that’s just happened, there’s also this humanitarian side of it where you go into this environment and you’re actually reading the story of this person, you get a real insight into their life, something which is really personal, and I find that really interesting.”
But it’s not all suicides and crime scenes for Luke at Rentokil, and he said that while the gorier aspects can be interesting, there are still plenty of other facets of the job that he enjoys, particularly the constant variety of the work. “No two days are ever the same, and I have a lot of freedom around what I do and when. So I’m able to schedule stuff and make it work for me, which is one of the key benefits of working with Rentokil, from my perspective.”
The other main pleasure that Luke says he gets from the job comes from moulding new recruits and seeing them grow. He said: “I really enjoy seeing people developed from where they are when they come in to where they are a few years later, I enjoy that personal development of other people.
“I love the general cohesion between the whole team too, it’s absolutely – and it sounds a bit naff to say – but it’s like a family, and it becomes a lifestyle rather than a career.”
www.rentokil-hygiene.co.uk
twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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