Alright everyone sit down, grab a coffee, tea, bagel, whatever. Welcome to one of the most dangerous jobs you'll ever have: Foundation custodian. The official name is engineering and technical service repair, maintenance, and hygiene specialist, but we call things what they are here.
Now this doesn't mean that you will die, quite the opposite, we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the Foundation, about 0.4%, in order to properly place that in perspective the rate for Foundation chaplains is 3%. Now does anyone have a guess how we keep it that low?
Anyone?
Well you're not a talkative bunch, are you? The answer is simple, we train for a long time and we have a healthy sense of fear. We don't hum while cleaning the floors, we always keep each item in its place and make sure it stays there, to put it simply we are always on watch. You never know when a skip might appear, one minute you are replacing a leaky pipe and the next you have seen the eyes of a long dead god who just happens to be living in that pipe.
This job isn't just about mopping the floor, we clean and repair the skips as well. Yes, you heard me right, you are the metaphorical T-Rex dentists, but once again, we train so we don't get eaten. Now I could blabber on all day but I feel that we learn best by talking about real world situations, so everyone get a folder from the back of the room.
Alright, everyone got one? Now take a moment to read though it.
Now that's the SCiPNET database file for 3998, now let's see if any of you paid attention during the training course about SCiPNET. Can anyone tell me the most common misconception about SCiPNET files? Yes you in the green turtleneck.
Well it seems that someone did actually pay attention, that's correct, the SCiPNET files are not the full files, they just contain the things that the researchers would need to know at a moment's notice but for each skip file there's hundreds of others that almost no researcher looks at. For any humanoid skip there are files about its past medical treatments, its favorite board games, and so forth. It's very important to follow these files, we don't want cultists to break into 2662's containment because someone used the wrong kind of soap and they think that offended 2662 somehow, yes that's happened. Now our job is not only to follow the files but to also make them. So let's talk about 3998, I will give you two maintenance proposals and you tell me the flaws.
Alright, first proposal, the flammable liquid created by 3998 is to be wiped off using damp cotton rags after spraying 3998 with a natural cleaning spray. Can anyone spot the problem? Yes you with the Hawaiian shirt.
Yes, that's correct, cotton burns easily, and while the locker is vacuum sealed there are many ways that oxygen can appear in the room, like the ferrets with the oxygen bubbles who teleport around, don't brother searching SCiPNET for those, those folks in Boring take care of them. So we have our own rags made of a special blend of wool, nylon, and a few other things I'm not allowed to tell you about. Yes, you with the blue tie, what's your question?
Well seems like you spotted what I was gonna talk about next, how do we deal with the runoff? Does anyone have any ideas? Yes, you with the baseball cap.
No, we don't use shop vacs, hard to use a vacuum in a vacuum. Any other ideas?
No, drain pipes would get clogged too fast and would break the vacuum. Anyone else?
You got the right idea, highly specialized tools. In fact we use this, Foundation Specialized Maintenance Tool N-847, but you will probably call it the 3998 fat scraper, this thing heats up ever so slightly to make it so you can clean the fat but not enough for the fat to catch fire. This brings us to the next lesson, FSMTs. We have a lot of them, when you are dealing with things that come that from other universes it's very unlikely that a standard socket wrench could open an access panel from a place where time doesn't exist. Another thing about FSMTs is that you have to put them back where you got them and never take them from the site. The reason that a Chaos Insurgency agent can't easily sneak into a site is because of this, this is FSMT-W-528, a Foundation head screwdriver, we don't use Phillips or slot or anything like that, we use Foundation screws, each site uses different ones and how they're made is a heavily guarded secret. So if you take one of these off-site then that would be a larger containment breach then if you decided to take a skip on a date. So these being put back into the toolbox is preventing the end of the world. Now there will be a lesson about them later but right now we're gonna talk about general repairs.
Just because you are replacing a light bulb in a bathroom doesn't mean you are any safer than when you are replacing a light bulb in the real Ed Sheeran's room. You always have to be on guard, and if you see something, report it, a scary sound might be a trick of the mind but there's also the possibility that it is a skip we haven't contained yet, in fact about 2% of the skips that that the Foundation contains were found by us. This is why you always carry a recorder on your person, something that you see while mopping the floors could be invaluable to the Foundation. And once again, have a healthy sense of fear, I cannot stress enough how important that is, we're cleaning up spilled drinks in a building that contains things that the world's smartest scientists don't even have half an idea on how they work. I've seen people, good people dragged into God knows where when they were fixing an air conditioner. In short, you not listening to a podcast may mean the difference between becoming part of a hive mind and not. But if you follow the files and use common sense you'll be fine.
Alright, everyone, let's take a break, when we get back we'll talk about how to clean up after humanoid skips and not die.
Also one last word, just because a junior researcher is a jerk doesn't mean that you can stop cleaning whatever skip they're assigned to so that an "accident" happens. However feel free to stop taking out their trash.
Per 
