Page 12 - The Life of Chris Turner

Managed to quote for carpet cleaning for the government, got small jobs at first but as it
was realised I good at carpet cleaning got larger jobs, then asked to quote for special
projects this meant having to have special clearance which took almost a year to get but I

could then walk into the royal palaces and other high security places

I am sure many of you have seen the pictures of the banquet room at Buckingham Palace
this is so large it took eight of us 2 days to clean the carpets, even the Queen & Prince
Philip came down to see us, but Phillip did not really want to be there as he was more
interested in carriage driving & wanted to practice that but the Queen said to him really
Phillip which was enough to keep him quite, I have a feeling I may have smiled at that

because he glared at me.

I also spent two weeks at Winsor Castle with 5 other carpet cleaning companies due to the
fire we spent 12 hours on duty cleaning carpets and then 12 off duty we worked days and
nights. Met the Queen and rest of the royals always remember the Queen was almost in
tears because of the damage to the carpets and the castle.

She personally thanked every contractor for their help we were all invited to a special
garden party at Bucking Palace which was rather interesting.

After all this excitement was asked if I could clean computer rooms now called data centres,
only problem was that they only normally closed down at Christmas eve to boxing day, had
to explain to them this was going to really cost them, but was told that the first one had not
been cleaned for 5 years and needed to be done and we were to do it. But there was a
problem there was no postcode for the site only a map reference, we ended up in a field

feeling rather stupid until we were surrounded by armed guards pointing guns at us
demanding to know what we were doing here. It seems that because my dad was a Major,
they had decided to see if I could map read and that is something, he made me do never
thought it would come in useful “Thanks Dad”. OMG that computer room was in a terrible
state there were five of us and for the first twelve hours we just never stopped no time for
even a coffee, but once we had the false ceiling down and cleaned and then lifted the floor

in computer rooms the floor is always raised so that cables can be run and there is air
circulating, we decided to have a nice fry up a full english breakfast then back to work we
were just clearing up the last bit of work taking the tarps of the computers when the staff
where coming back in. We all where knackered but well pleased with ourselves and the
supervisor of the site was over the moon so everybody was happy. And I was paid on time
very unusual for that to happen, went on to clean most of the computer rooms even though

most of them do not appear on maps.

Decided to retire from Cleaning fed-up working nights and average of 120 hours a week.
Told by the Sargent Major who ran the Contracting side of Government Contracts it was
not going to happen I had to report to Whitehall Had interview and carried on working for
another department as a liaison officer Sorry can’t tell you any more due to official Secrets
act.