A CLEAN SLATE
When she was given a chance, she rose to the occasion
The fourth in a six-part series. Today: Leslie Rose.
From nursing to cleaning. For Leslie Rose, it meant working hard to make it all work.
“I was working at a personal care home,” Ms. Rose, 62, of Homestead, said. “I went to Duff’s business school and I got my certificate and they placed me there. I was doing everything that an LPN would do. I was doing wounds, passing out meds, cleaning people.
“I was doing it all, and then they were trying to put more work on us. They said we had to do laundry. We had to clean, too, and do the patients and do the meds. I was like, ‘that’s too much work.’ I stayed there for five years, and I quit. Then I got into retail, and they laid me off.”
Sometimes advice comes from many places. In this case for Ms. Rose, it came from a fellow
passenger on a bus.
“So I was taking my daughter to get some school clothes and there was this guy on the bus,” she said. “He said, ‘Well, Leslie, they’re hiring down at this cleaning company.’”
Ms. Rose wondered if you needed experience to apply for the job.
The passenger said she did not.
“My first day as a cleaner, I had one of those big dust mops,” she said. “And the guy was looking at me, and I didn’t really know how to use it right. And he said, ‘What did you do before?’”
Ms. Rose told him she was a nursing assistant.
“Maybe you should go back to that,” the man replied
“Are you serious? Give me a chance, you know,” she said. “This is my first day on the job. So give me a chance. Please teach me. Teach me how to do it properly, so I know next time how to do it.”
So he did.
“Then [the supervisor] said if anybody wants to make extra money, you can,” she said. “‘You can stay out with me longer.’ So I think, I would like to make some extra money. If I put this little bit away for my daughter and put this away for the house, you know, just in case I need something for the house, then I’m good.
“So that’s what I did. I worked overtime and bought a car. I bought a phone for my daughter. I bought new furniture for my house and went on a little vacation
“I like to clean. I was always the one cleaning up my mom’s house. I started the ball rolling. There were 10 of us. Five brothers and five sisters. I said, ‘If we clean and we do it together we can get out of here and go play.’ We weren’t going anywhere until we cleaned and did our chores.”
Ms. Rose looks into the future, beyond her cleaning job in an Oakland building.
“I like babies, infants. And not just the infants that are born healthy,” she said. “The ones that are struggling with the drugs and stuff. I tried getting into that but it was just so much. I might still do it when I’m retired. I might just go and volunteer, you know, touch base with what I really wanted to do. I would like to have been a neonatal nurse.”