Within the floor-care industry, a
misnomer for a piece of
floor-care equipment that should actually just be called a
stripper...but I guess it's
understandable why they wouldn't want to do that.
Picture a
big round brillo pad on a stick. Make it
really heavy. Make it
spin and trail a cord like a
very inconvenient vacuum cleaner, just perfectly
designed to turn you into a
blue-faced,
badly bruised mummy of electrical cord. Oh, and don't forget that it
de facto makes the floor underneath it
very slippery. Put some
half-crocked blue collar workers on it and you have a perfect recipe for some of
the most amusing security tapes known to man.
The
waxing is generally done with
mops, because if you tried to
wax with a stripper your floor would have
spirals in it,
like crop circles, only stickier.
A "stripper" or "stripper-waxer" is not to be confused with a "buffer" or "
high-speed buffer", which looks similar but has a different
motor, uses
different pads and is
less heavy (so that it doesn't gouge up the wax). A buffer is also easier to
use and thus
not as funny to watch someone using.
Of course, the
alternate definitions of this
term are many...but none of the stripper-waxers I know in
real life would appreciate being mentioned here.