Chapter 5
Making a Wildcat Profession into Trade
However, SERI soon moved into another place. It was just across the promenade in another house of the same kind. They rented it first, later would buy it and after that they would sell it and buy a much better and larger similar premises in the same object of four houses having the same square inner court as ours. From our back door we would see theirs. After that Futttar had this office for its own purposes. Again there was change in the sitting order, but not only that. Some months earlier a monthly had been started for people working in the cleaning sector with the title of TisztaTerTechnologia. T. wanted to fill it with his own writings, with those of others of the industry and with advertisements. When I joined the firm, also some translated articles were published in the monthly, especially German originals, as their style was much more practical than British or American texts.
T. has always been a driving force everywhere he appeared. As soon as Futttar was established he wanted to organize events for the sector and for this reason he tried to contact the Hungarian Society for Mechanical Engineers (its abbreviation is GTE in Hungarian) that had a section for cleaning. Well it was exactly the kind of section that can hold its annual meeting in a phone booth. T. joined it and his personality made him the right candidate for sectional secretary at the next election. The man he took the title from didn’t like it of course and at a later election he got it back. Well, it was no big loss for T., because by that time he has already started to create a trade association. He used his existing personnel and also hired two women from the neighbourhood as telemarketing agents. He had another idea and it was launching short training courses on cleaning basics.
However, for that he needed two more things: support of cleaning companies to hire people who took part in such a course and educational material. At the first thing his telemarketing agents helped him. Although it cost a lot of money to use mobile phones for this purpose, it would pay back soon. Cleaning companies were looked up and contacted, most of them were small firms with a few employees – unskilled of course – and the managers were very keen to get into the main stream of a trade being born. Although a few firms kept distance as their managers found something in T. that they disliked – his character mainly, because he was energetic and accepted no excuse for being slow or unwilling – a list of cleaning companies were compiled. Our office began to be too small as managers of the cleaning firms came to see T. and change ideas. A general understanding was spreading on the training topic and also on creating a trade association. T. was throwing the bait in the right place, in about half a year the founding session of the association was called together and its statutes was passed in the meeting. Its name became MATISZ (an abbreviation of Hungarian Cleaning Industry Association) and as its first secretary T. was elected for two years. It was an unpaid work for him, but both individual and company members were to pay an annual membership fee.
As for educational material for the training courses it was a slower work. T. had already started something called TisztaTerTechnologia Kodex, a collection of written knowledge about all connected to cleaning, actually loose sheets in a folder with hard cover. Its structure shown in its contents was very clear – although few of those listed had been worked out – and it could be purchased in its current condition, but chapters were going to be bought after their finishing additionally and filed in the proper place in the folder. It was to be the material for a master course foreseen in some years in the future. For ordinary cleaning operatives a much shorter version was to be compiled.
Finished chapters in the codex had been written by people of proper knowledge in the field of each chapter, for example, physics and chemistry that were the two most important topics in cleaning were written by high school teachers. However, as cleaning involves some special areas, and it didn’t exist in Hungarian, T. ordered the counterpart of his would be codex in German – in that country, unlike ours, cleaning had already been included in the list of officially accepted trades. The four volumes contained about four thousand pages. T. leafed it through and decided which parts were the most pressing to translate and put into a Hungarian language textbook. It made my job safe at least for two years. The busy activity I took part in made T. decide so that my pay according to the original agreement could be supplemented monthly. It did me very good of course, but, as I didn’t want to be paid in black, I had to organize my tax ID number to be able to write out a bill and make it a company cost item instead of making it a reduction of T’s pay. It took me some hours sitting in the waiting room of the tax authority and filling in forms very strange and hard to understand.
Although with the registration of MATISZ there happened some administrative mistakes, it succeeded and the events followed in a long line. It was the end of 1999 and, as it is always so, there were some impatient people who wanted to meet the Third Millennium one year earlier – my opinion is that if the first year was the 1st one and not Number 0, then the thousandth will end with a zero and not with figure nine. For this reason all kinds of programs were organized. One of them was seen as a good initiative, and it really was one, but the expansion of the EU in 2004 made it less important, let alone other factors I am to write more about. It was the conference of cleaning associations in all Central and Eastern European countries.
From that earlier part of his life when he had been the secretary of section of cleaning within GTE, T. knew all people personally who were in key positions in the cleaning sector throughout Europe. At that time I write about he contacted first of all the EFCI, a federation of European cleaning industry associations and spoke with him about the conference. He was going out from his job for retirement, but he promised T. to give his weight for this event. He did it as he sent a German person, a leading figure in another federation, to represent him. Also all of the associations – or those in the phase of being established – in the Eastern part of Central Europe have been invited. It included the Polish and Czech organizations as well as people from Slovakia and Romania – more precisely Transylvania – active in cleaning services. The meeting called Central European Meeting or CEM in short was planned to be held in a separate room of a newly re-opened, but historically respectable café in the inner city of Budapest, its name is Central. It is a really prominent place, you can see there all our celebrities when you go in to drink a cup of coffee.
We were already deep in winter and it had to be accepted that this office was not an ideal one without insulation under the floor. Also there was a constant draught through the gaps under doors on the two ends of the room even without wind, and in windy weather the entrance door was either opening from time to time, or it was difficult to open at all. Susan had almost always hay fever during flowering season, and it was almost the same that time, only it was caused by cold instead of allergy. The heating was in order, only its designer had not taken into account the points of compass: on the south side at the backdoor there were more radiators and on the other side almost nothing. Always someone fell ill.
With me it had already been well substantiated in Moscow, and soon I experienced hardness of urinating, even a drop of blood sometimes, and every evening my fever went up. I don’t like going to doctors, but it was necessary. Our family doctor was a very special person, I can recall only positive memories about him. He sent me to the urology and there my severe inflammation was ascertained and medicine prescribed. It took me about a month to consider myself healthy again, and then it was already spring coming. But one thing I learned: sitting in a cold room and working is only permissible when you have enough cloths on you.
However, the event I was mentioning, the first CEM conference was held around February, with everything in order, the participating representatives of foreign associations were keen to sign the protocol and in the future it was to be held each year. It was a really cordial discussion partly in English and sometimes in German and, although some of our compatriots from other circles than T’s, who were thinking they could make some profit by grabbing the helm in the industry, were present without being invited – and, as they didn’t understand what was going on, they began to demand that the translator, i.e. me, make them understand all –, acknowledged at last that they can only make profit of it, if they do something for the community. I was present to help T. in communicating in English and German, he would later learn English and wouldn’t need any help. But that time he still needed it. It was very hard for me, as my going to the doctor followed only after the conference.
The first CEM was followed by an official dinner. It is my conviction that the actors of the Hungarian cleaning sector made the first step in this evening to become a functioning community. The next day, although it was weekend, we met with the foreigners in T’s office and the Polish association’ chairman, himself a deciding figure in the cleaning industry in that country, presented T. with a gift, a statuette of a cleaning woman cast of bronze. It was the symbol of the Polish Association then. That association would fall apart for the same reason as ours almost would do in our country. But at that time it was not to be yet.
T’s true aim has always been to lift the cleaning profession from the level of a not-recognized occupation to the height of an officially registered trade. He wanted to level the way for it by organizing the actors, establishing a trade association and start training courses for both operators and managers. He succeeded in the first two during the first year of my stay with the company. And for the third one it was my slow and hard work that was needed. He had to have the material for the textbooks in the operators’ course, as well as the much more complicated and more scientific texts and articles for the future masters’ course. I was doing it and in about six months after my joining the firm T. could edit the TTT Codex and parts of that he could select for the operators.