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When you are next travelling through an airport take a few moments to look at how clean it is. Are the floors strewn with litter and detritus? 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 work surrounded by people hurrying off to overseas business meetings and vacations. There are countless fast food outlets who appear to have conspired to serve up their food in enough packaging to fill and refill all of the airport bins several times over every single day.

Marie is one of the busy cleaners at Glasgow’s busy international airport. She has worked at Prestwick as well as Aberdeen and Edinburgh airports but she says that she prefers Glasgow as it is so much busier.

A typical day for her starts at 4 a.m. when she starts the early morning shift, preparing the airport for that days influx of 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’ve even found a wheel chair, a false leg and a bag containing an inflatable love doll.’

A key skill of anyone working as an airport cleaner is the ability to deal with people. ‘The ability to remain calm when a passenger is panicking because they may miss their flight is definitely a bonus’ said Marie.

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