“Seriously, just be glad they have wipes now!” says Kaitlyn when I poke fun at the eight wipes she uses every single morning. “It’s so much better than before.”

How so?

“It was really nasty the first time I worked here,” which was a couple of years ago under the old managment, she says. “They didn’t clean the desks, and they didn’t have any of those wipes. You could bring hand sanitizer, and some people brought Lysol wipes even though you weren’t supposed to. We were pretty much all constantly sick, though. I caught MRSA pretty bad, but it wasn’t—”

“Wait, what?” I almost shriek. Half the room looks over, curious.

“Huh?” Kaitlyn looks confused.

My brain has stalled out. “What? Did you just say you got fucking MRSA?” As in the “superbug” that doesn’t respond to most antibiotics? Like Ebola, it’s something I’d read about, but never expected to encounter in real life.

[...]

“Well, I tried to get help with the bills from them, because I know that I got it from here,” she says, grimacing. But at the time, she hadn’t hit the three-month mark at Convergys yet. “So I was uninsured and paying everything out of pocket. My husband and I had saved up for the baby, so we were prepared for my C-section and maybe a little bit extra, but not something like this.
“So I went back and explained to them what happened, but they just refused.” Kaitlyn sighs. “They said they were sorry, but that was that unless I had cold, hard proof of everything.”

“Holy shit, that’s awful!” I say. “Did you quit?”

“I stayed for a while—because, you know, bills—but I kept Lysol wipes in my bag whether they liked it or not. They didn’t want me to use them, so I’d have to wipe everything down super fast and dry it and shove everything back in my pocket,” says Kaitlyn. Damn—I knew they were serious about the no-paper policy, but extending the ban to Lysol wipes? I try to think of it from Taylor’s mistrustful point of view—I guess you could write someone’s credit-card information on a Lysol wipe?