Exactly a year and a day—corresponding to the time period an escaped Medieval peasant could claim freedom—after my high school graduation, I started my first real full-time job: janitor of the Historical Society of York County. There were ups and downs there, and many reasons why I referred to it as the Hysterical Society but, despite the lowly position, I did learn a great deal: carpentry in building the conservation hut, lighting art exhibits, and I think I even once presented the introduction to a Thursday silent film showing when the Curator of Education wasn’t there, a harbinger of my future teaching days.
In other locations, I’ve recounted the event that propelled me out of the job and into college. Briefly, after shoveling and salting a long sidewalk, I vacuumed the carpeted steps to the library, and after I put the vacuum away and came to admire my work, someone had tracked salty footsteps all the way up those stairs. In that moment, literally, I thought to myself: I need to go back to school.
After I had applied, been accepted, and made my first class schedule, I gave my notice. By this point, a year into my working there, having survived the firings of an Executive Director* and a curator, I had become a regular part of the staff, and they valued my work. They asked if I wanted to work part-time in the evenings. Of course, they’d hire someone full-time for the day to make sure the normal operations, such as emptying trash cans and cleaning the rest rooms, would still be done in a timely fashion.
I didn’t want to tell them that the job wasn’t really full-time and that anyone could accomplish everything in less than 8 hours, so I agreed.
The guy they hired as my replacement was an older man, and very going ho. In his first two weeks, he did so much! He was the busiest of bees, doing everything I had done with such good spirits, and very clean too! In fact, when I would come in, there’d be nothing for me to do, really, and so they decided that I should work on “special projects.” Before they could determine what that would mean, I decided to leave. Back then, financial aid could allow a person to get full tuition, and so I didn’t really need the job to pay for school, and my ethics didn’t allow me to take their money for nothing; I couldn’t sit around unsupervised all evening and collect a paycheck. That wasn’t me.
Now, oddly enough, with me out of the picture, the new guy suddenly slacked off. He didn’t need to prove his worth. He stopped being the super cleaner, and became the embarrassment. And they noted he’d go into the janitor’s closet and funny noises would come out while he was in there. No one knew what was going on, and I guess no one wanted to check.
Things got so bad that the staff decided they were going to close down one day for a total cleaning. Everyone was going to pitch it dusting, mopping, etc. I decided to stop by that day to see how it was going, leading to one of my favorite funny moments in janitorial service.
The bookkeeper, a middle-aged woman, had the task of stripping the floor of the main exhibit room. When I arrived, she was standing by the buffer. She asked what was wrong with it. She demonstrated her problem: gripping the handles, she’d turn it on, and it would slam into the wall. She’d pull it back, and repeat the same process. I said, “Let me try.” I assumed the position, turned it on, and it spun in place. She said okay, and tried again; again it slammed into the wall. I then showed her how to hold the handle to prevent that from happening. She was amazed.
Eventually I stopped visiting and have no idea if they hired someone else to clean, or if the building is currently under a giant pile of dust and grime. The moral of the story, if there is one, is don’t chase off the guy with the knowledge and work ethic for expediency.
* The Executive Director was quite the piece of work; I guess now I would diagnose him as a narcissist. He was having trouble wrangling the board of directors, and was discussing with someone the meeting that would be held that afternoon. I was dusting the exhibit nearby but of course as a menial janitor I was invisible and he felt he could say whatever he wanted to around me. And so he laid out his strategy for the meeting and said (and I am not kidding, this is a direct quote because I wrote it down immediately thereafter), “Then the iron hand will come down and come down quickly to consolidate my victory.”
They fired him at that meeting.
And no one missed him.
MUSOFYR 