Somebody Has to Do It
My dentist wanted to do something with my bite to relieve the jaw pain. He is retired military, a veteran, short, really thick glasses, dentist breath. He absolutely loves his work. Loves creating perfectly aligned teeth. It is his specialty, his passion. This inclines him to interpret many problems as problems of alignment. Things not coming together as they should.
I told him I grind my teeth out of habit, that’s all. I bare my teeth at him. They line up fine. I don’t need a realignment, not my teeth, not my jaw. He smiles his I-know-better-smile but doesn’t push. He is a veteran. He’s learned not to care too much.
I went to him because the dental coverage was part of my benefits plan at the university and because I respect someone who is passionate about their work. Even if it leads to a certain blindness.
I’m passionate about my work. It’s love-hate but it’s passionate. I’ve discovered that the only way to get through what I do is to be passionate about it.
I am the Building Services Manager at a small university. The campus is just shy of a million square feet. All the buildings are my crew’s and my responsibility to take care of. I take care of my crew, they take care of me, and together we clean all the buildings on campus. Behind the fancy name, we’re the housekeeping department. Housekeeping—janitors. What’s the big deal, most people think. Somebody leaning on a mop drooling.
We have twenty-five hundred kids living on campus, a total of five thousand attending classes, four hundred faculty and staff, and scores of special events for the public. Without us none of that would happen. Faculty could go on strike for a week, a month, half the kids wouldn’t notice. The President, she can go visit Pakistan for three weeks setting up a teacher education program, who cares?
That’s not the way it is with us. Elaine calls in sick at 4:30 AM on Wednesday, she’s got the Admin Building, and by 9:00 AM I get calls. The trash hasn’t been emptied. No TP in the second stall of the Ladies Room. I’ve already got it covered by pulling and bulling. We’ll be there by ten to get it done. I pitch in at times. My boss doesn’t like it. He says we’re the swinging dicks, we don’t do the work, we make sure the work gets done. He’s from New York. You hear him, you’d know that. He’s right in theory. But people, even professors, don’t care as much about theory as they care about a clean bathroom and an empty trashcan. When somebody’s out, and somebody is always out, times three some days, we make it work.
We walk out for one day—half a day—the wheels begin grinding to a halt. Nobody could function if we didn’t get there starting at 4:00 AM and going round the clock. Imagine a bathroom in a men’s dorm Monday morning. We’re talking a weekend of drinking and vomiting and pissing in the corridors and stairwells. The proverbial snow of CO2 extinguisher foam and shaving cream blanketing the mirrors and sinks. Gang shower drains sporting hairballs the size of mice along with used condoms. Puke over and around the toilet stalls. And a plugged toilet that’s overflowed with a big turd left floating in nasty water. Sinks filled with pale macaroni, Ramen noodles and stuff we can’t identify or would rather not. Like the snot on the walls directly above the urinals. Why the guys do that, I have no idea. Maybe it’s just because they can. Maybe the ones that do it think it’s their mothers that have to clean it up. It’s not.
It’s us. We shake our heads, we complain, we curse the little sons-o-bitches and hope their nuts fall off, but we do it. And most of us can look around afterward and know we’ve made a difference. Know we’re taking care of these little bastards—somebody’s got to. We know why we’re here. We can see the impact we’re making if only for a short while. Cleaning is one of the most definitive acts I know. If we’re not there at 4:00 AM the next day to do it all over again, the place falls apart. Can the profs say that?
Most people assume it’s the dorms that are the worst, and they can be the most disgusting. But by mid-morning, the kids, when they’re mostly sober and not half-crazed, are good kids. Away from home for the first time, some of them latch on to us like we’re Mom and Dad. We’re down-to-earth grownups they can identify with, unlike the faculty, many of whom have drifted varying distances off into space, some into orbit. The kids can see we’re there to care for them.
The real challenges are the office and classroom buildings. The faculty are the prima donnas and we don’t usually deal with them but there’s always a percentage of bureaucratic admin personnel, administrative assistants, and clerical staff that are out to get us. It is like they are resentful at how low they feel on the totem pole—but then there’s us. Treating us like we’re lower yet seems to assuage those feelings. It’s a minefield, cleaning around everyone else’s sense of prestige. And there are all the routine explosive situations—when someone is losing at office politics, is overstretched at home, wading through a divorce, or any number of dramas unrelated to cleaning that somehow land on us.
Like when I have to go to bat for Georgette who cleans the Education Department’s office. She’s also responsible for an additional 10,000 square feet that includes going out to two residential houses converted to offices. I visit the office to hear, “I put a gum wrapper there two weeks ago.” The admin assistant is pointing under her desk’s knee-well at a flash of foil from a gum wrapper set off in the corner. It’s a bright spot in the dimness; just one more hotspot in my day. Her wastebasket is on the other side, emptied. “Two weeks,” she says.
My jaw clenches. There are things I’d like to say to her. Things that need to be said, to educate this young woman about her mistakes—not about the gum wrapper but about how she’s living her life. How she is missing it and wants somebody to pay. How she wants to make something bad happen to someone else so they feel worse than she does.
The simplest and most honest thing I could say would be, “Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t put trash on the floor. We already have enough trash to clean up.” But I don’t say that. I pick up the silver strip, pinch it into a ball, and drop it in the trash can while I’m still on my knees. I take a breath.
“There,” I say. “There.” And then I explain, “I’m sorry, sometimes these things happen. The most important thing to us is our customers.” I do think it’s all about the customer. Nearly.
I say, “We want you to enjoy your workspace, to be able to take pride in it like we do.” Then I say we’re cleaning 986,000 square feet of campus buildings. I explain that the woman who is doing her office is also doing all the offices on this floor and the one above and then has to travel out and do two small office buildings before she finishes her shift. If her partner in the building is out, she has to police their areas as well. I try to educate this admin assistant by telling her that office cleaning staff vacuum only the high traffic areas four days out of five. Then on the fifth day, they do a full vacuum.
I have to portion everything out since there isn’t staff enough to do everything everybody wants. We’re at the bottom of the new-positions-priority-list and I have to try and align the work needed with the staff I’ve got. I have daily, weekly, monthly, and twice-yearly schedules with task descriptions for every occupied and utilized space on campus. We don’t water personal plants, make coffee, wash dishes, or hang pictures—though we are constantly asked—we clean. Except the animal labs and the electron microscope. They’re on their own with those.
“I’ll talk to Georgette,” I say, and I will. Georgette will get pissed off for a few minutes at the injustice, the innate meanness. Then we’ll laugh; both of us have been at this a long time, Georgette the longest. So, it isn’t a big deal. And there is no excuse for the wrapper to sit there for two weeks. Georgette knows this as well as I do. She’s a pro. She has probably been set up like this before. It is surprising how often the carefully placed piece of paper is used by people that should have better things to do. I tell Georgette to make sure she gets under the desk when she does her vacuum. And she will. Georgette doesn’t set the house on fire, but she’s conscientious and steady.
I’ve got the ones who aren’t. Who don’t care. They come to work to hide from it, do as little as they can, shrug their responsibility. I weed them out, but it takes time. And then there are the incidents of poor performance that stem from all the turmoil my crew has going on in their own lives.
I caught Burroughs using the Johnny mop he uses on toilet bowls to swab out the drinking fountain on the second-floor of his boys’ dorm. Using a Johnny mop on the drinking fountain is like a waiter spitting on someone’s sandwich. It’s meanness. It’s not the kind of thing Burroughs does. There’s no excuse for it. Not in my buildings. Not with my kids.
I try never to raise my voice—I never shout. Who am I to shout at one of my people? Would I let anyone shout at me?
“What are you doing?” I ask. Burroughs hears me.
“What,” he says. “What?” and we both know he knows. He tries to slide through. “I’m using the disinfectant cleaner.” I shake my head. I know I look disgusted because I can see his whole face sag. His face looks gray. It looks loose.
“Listen, Burroughs, I like you,” I say. “You’ve always done good work,” I say. “But you do that again, I’ll fire you on the spot.” I’m looking straight at him. I’m not making it easy on either of us.
He starts getting into a boil, but his heart isn’t half-way into it. He looks tired, beat. His color is a little like the gray water fountain he was Johnny-mopping. He stops his sputtering. “OK,” he says. “Yeah, OK.”
A month later he lost all his hair. He was fifty-five. In two months he was out on the Family Leave Act and dead in five, a fast-moving cancer they were slow to catch. I miss him. I think about him. We talked a little before he went on leave.
“Oh yeah. Sure.” He’s nodding. “You aren’t getting rid of me this easy.” He stares down at the tiles on the floor.
“Everything’s going to be alright,” I tell him. It’s awkward but I pat his shoulder. “You get back here. I need your sorry ass,” I say to let him know I care—I almost never swear with my people.
Burroughs was always one of my good ones. One to set an example. A truly great floor man. In the summers he was head of the floor crews, stripping and laying finish in the classroom buildings. Leaving a flawless satin sheen behind him.
For the most part, I’ve got a band of professionals. Anybody that doesn’t think that never tried to keep a university campus clean. It’s not like cleaning your house. That’s what people think. They clean their bathroom at home and think it translates. Not even close. If we cleaned like that, we’d drown in our own flotsam. Like a thousand other jobs, for the big picture to happen all the piddly little shit has got to get done. In the grand scheme it’s important; it’s small and important.
That’s what I tell my people when they need pepping up. I tell them we set the stage. I get stagy myself trying to inspire them to get back into those bathrooms, classrooms, admin offices after Spring Fling when everything gets flung all over. I want them to take pride in what they do. To know it matters. What we do matters. It takes skills—and heart. You can’t do what we do day in and day out and not have heart.
And it’s never done. I’ll be dead and gone; Monday morning 4:00 AM rolls around and somebody has got to clean the shower drains, wipe the shaving cream off the mirrors, and there are three call-ins to deal with. I tell my people that makes us the lucky ones. We’ve got job security. Until the profs can pick up after themselves, the department secretaries and admin assistants stop looking for somebody lower on the totem pole, until the kids grow up, which they only begin to do here, stop drinking, partying, pissing in the stairwells and basically being eighteen to twenty-one-year-olds—until then, our jobs are guaranteed. Somebody has to do it. We’re in it together. Who’s going to be there to clean up the mess if not us? Who?
Lately, I’ve noticed I am clenching my jaw less. I’m clicking my teeth together instead. Like tapping a finger on a table top or tapping a toe when there’s no music. I’ve started doing it without thinking. Nothing to do with anger turned inwards. I think it has to do with the thrumming inside me. A thrumming set off by what I’ve done, what I’m doing—and what I have yet to do. I consider it progress.
Michael Horton has lived in New Hampshire, Ohio, New York, Kansas, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Florida, and now calls Burlington, Vermont home. At different times, he has worked as the Osceola County Bookmobile librarian, a shift manager at McDonald’s, a factory worker in a rubber parts plant, a prep cook, a janitor in a men’s dormitory, a purchasing agent, and an IT guy—but writing is what he does. His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, Iron Horse Review, Raleigh Review, Porter House Review, and Whitefish Review among others. Stories have been nominated for “Best of the Net” and the Pushcart Prize. His story collection was a finalist for the 2023 Black Lawrence Book Award.
