In 2009 I went cleaning the newly built swimming pool in Bruntal with this company. And let me tell you, it was something insane. We were handed giant containers of vinegar and some of the cheapest cleaning products, and we were told that we had to clean everything. Sure, in some places there were dried drops of paint, but otherwise it was a brand-new pool, so everything in it was already clean. The company Rotto was supposedly based in Trinec, but there was nothing at the address it listed; not even a single mailbox for the company Rotto existed at that address.
When we asked around at “their” address whether anyone knew anything about this company, everyone just shook their heads and said they had never heard of anything like that in their lives. But let me start from the beginning. It all began when I came across their ad for a temp job somewhere and got in touch with them. I don’t remember much anymore, because I’m writing this 3 years later, but apart from the things where I explicitly say I’m not sure about them, all the “experiences” here are real and exactly as they happened. I could choose where they would pick me up: either in Trinec at some supermarket, or in Tesin at Lidl, or in Tesin at Billa.
I chose Lidl, and I don’t even know why anymore, probably because someone was driving me there by car and Lidl is closer than Billa. Only 2 people got on in Tesin; the car arrived already full from Trinec. The other person was a certain “Toni” (I won’t give his last name), who I’m friends with on FB and who I became friends with there. They picked us up at around 5 in the afternoon and then we drove to Bruntal along all sorts of slow roads, maybe because there is no highway to Bruntal, maybe because the car might have fallen apart, maybe because the car didn’t have a highway vignette.
We arrived and started carrying in the big cleaning machines and the already mentioned cheap cleaning products and vinegar. I think it was only then that they gave us the price list showing how much we would be paid; everything there was calculated in hellers. I’m not entirely sure whether they gave us that price list or whether I just saw it lying around somewhere (I do stick my nose into everything), but that’s roughly how it was. We got to work, constantly dipping rags in vinegar and scrubbing the tiles until they looked worse than when we arrived. On top of that, if I remember correctly, we cleaned only the pool/basin itself, not the surrounding areas and walkways.
It drove me crazy to watch someone ride all night long on that huge “rotating” scrubber made by Rotto (which is also where the company got its name), and instead of working from the middle toward the edges, he went back and forth along the same path a million times. Around 5 in the morning I couldn’t take it anymore, and every now and then I went to lie down on the plastic benches in one of the walkways and fell asleep instantly. My sleep didn’t last long, though, because the people cleaning with me kept waking me up.
I had no idea what they were yelling at me, but I knew that I had to get up right away. Luckily I only went to lie down like that once, at most twice, but after being woken up so roughly I walked around like a body without a soul. I was so desperate to sleep that I was just waiting for the supervisors to show up (nobody from the Rotto company appeared there the whole night). In the end the moment came at 6 in the morning, when it was absolutely freezing cold and we were loading those giant scrubbers back into the van.
Everyone got a sheet of paper with columns for location, number of hours worked and supervisor’s signature. The supervisor filled it in for me, and just as I was sitting in the car because I really couldn’t go on, Toni sat down next to me and I got so caught up talking with him that at least the waiting flew by, and we also swapped our Facebook profiles. He wrote down 9 hours for me personally, so I was overjoyed, but that didn’t last long, and I’ll explain why in a few sentences. We drove back to Tesin, they dropped me off at Billa this time, and with the feeling that maybe it hadn’t been a complete waste, I somehow made it home.
Now I realize there isn’t really that much to explain – simply put, when I looked for the company at the address listed online, nothing like it had ever existed there. I don’t think there was even a single mailbox labeled Rotto s.r.o. There were only lots of unlabeled mailboxes. So I got scammed, and there are probably plenty of people like me, because to this day I still come across an old white van on the roads with the sign Rotto s.r.o. Trinec.