About us All hands on deck for the second Valeriana training session!

Last Saturday, we launched the second round of our professional cleaning training course led by cleaning expert Tarsi Athanasiadis. The beginning of this week’s training session looked a little more like a chemistry class the way we may remember it from school, featuring safety goggles, pipettes and even an experiment.

The egg white experiment. Did you know that egg white and the human eye share 97% structural similarity? Everyone gathered around Tarsi to watch the experiment unfold. Tarsi wanted to demonstrate what happens if you get cleaning detergent in your eyes and, even more importantly, what one should do in such a situation — safety is always first!

After the chemistry lesson, we continued with the main topic of the second training session — “cleaning surfaces”. In the first training session, we had already learned that professional cleaning requires training and practice, how much skill and know-how are involved in this and the fact that working ergonomically has to be learned, too.

When Tarsi demonstrated how to properly hold a vacuum cleaner, none of us could believe it. The length of the vacuum cleaner hose is no accident — the hose is as long as it is so that one can vacuum while standing upright and carry the vacuum cleaner around comfortably. Most of us are now probably picturing ourselves dragging the vacuum cleaner around with a hunched back — but not Tarsi. She does it with grace and ease. All she had to say to our way of vacuuming was: “That’s history” and a laugh. Incidentally, the industry term for professional vacuum cleaning is “dry vacuuming” — learned something new again.

 
The great thing about the second training session was that the Valeriana staff could immediately apply what they had learned. Our hearts skipped a beat when one of them happily told us that she could now work much more efficiently since learning several new techniques during the first course in April and that learning about more ergonomic ways of working her work had become much easier.

We are looking forward to the third and final training session which will focus on window cleaning. After weeks of rain, our windows can’t wait to shine in their usual splendour again.