When you next take a flight spare a few moments to look around the airport terminal. Do you see discarded food and drinks containers everywhere? No, its sparkling and clean.

Most busy airports need an army of cleaners to keep their terminals clean and usable while so many passengers pass through. They perform their much needed work while others are busily heading off to business meetings or vacations. All the fast food restaurants produce enough packaging to fill the airport bins every day, several times over.

Marie is just one of the many hundreds of cleaners employed to kee Glasgow’s busy international airport clean. She has previously gained experience at various other Scottish airports, Aberdeen and Edinburgh, but prefers Glasgow as it is much busier.

A nornal day for Marie and others on the early shif will start at 4 a.m. when she starts the early morning shift, getting the airport spruced up ready for that days travellers. She told us that the biggest daily problem she must deal with is unattended luggage. ‘Even though people are aware of the threat of terrorism they still leave their bags and wander off to the loo. If i come across an unattended bag I am obliged to report it to airport security. Some people get very upset when they return to find their bag being treated like a bomb’.

Marie told us that she doesn’t meet many rude or obnoxious passengers but they do appear from time to time. She said: ‘There was a young man at the airport last week who purposely dropped his milkshake on the floor that I had just polished and another who just threw his food packaging toward a bin without bother to make sure that it went inside’.

Along with unattended luggage Marie often finds things that people have left behind. She said: ‘By far the most common things I find these days are mobile phones, but laptops are also common. I even once found a carrier bag that was stuffed full of American dollars.’

A key skill of anyone working as a cleaner in an airport is the ability to deal with people from all walks of life and from a variety of nationalities. ‘The ability to remain calm when someone is in a panic because they are late for their flight is definitely a bonus’ said Marie.

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