Secrets of a Dorm Room Janitor

A Desperate Story From the College Years

I started out as a roustabout, cleaning up — elephants are vegetarians and leave a lot to be desired. I was the guy who was shoveling the “lot to be desired.”

- Al Lewis (a.k.a. Grandpa Munster)

My freshman year of college was an awakening in many ways. It was my first time away from home, the first time I had to do my own laundry and the first time no one ever said anything about having a girl in your room at 3:15 in the morning. As a first year college student living in the co-ed dorms, I slowly began to learn that there is such a thing as too much freedom.

Too much freedom makes you late for class, drunk on Thursday night and out of cash by the end of the month. The first two aspects of freedom I am still ironing out to this day, but the cash poor thing I had dealt with before. The solution to the cash problem was simple. I needed an on-campus job.

Like most institutes of higher learning, I knew that if I wanted a job with the college, I needed to go to the job placement center. The center was located in a dimly-lit corner of an ancient administration building. This was the place where desperation lived. The center may be compared to an inner city bus depot, where derelicts and drunken street people were replaced by panicked fourth year undergrads who just declared their major three weeks prior to graduation and now needed an internship job with a Fortune 500 company. And then there were the poor scholarship kids, who desperately need some spending money to cover over inflated textbook bills, non-budgeted personal hygiene products and the weekly beer fund. I was one of those who fit into the latter category.

As I filled out the application for on-campus employment, I had visions of a cushy desk job in the English or Science department, pushing paper around or running small errands for large-egoed professors. Of course, what job I really ended with was a position as dormitory janitor. Though not my first choice of campus employment, the idea of polishing floors and sweeping up dirt did not seem too bad, especially since I would not have to dress up for work.

My first week on the job was awesome. It was early October when I reported to the custodial office. I was given the assignment of “shadowing” one of the regular guys to learn the fine art of custodial maintenance. My mentor, John, was a huge man with giant hands, sleepy eyes and a soft, boyish look about him. He never spoke too much and quite frankly, I’m sure he did not know what to make of me. There is always some general suspicion about the new guy on the team. John was not sure if I was an undercover janitorial agent, an industrious (but poor) student or part of some crime and punishment rehabilitation program for wayward youth. As he mulled these thoughts over in his brain, I thought it best to stay quiet and do what I was told. After a few weeks, John began to warm up to me. As we went from building to building, he would begin to reveal secrets about the college campus that were privy to only a select few. You see, the campus was built on the Dodge Family Farm. Yes, the same Dodge family that made its money making cars. The land retained many of the old farm buildings, including haylofts, sheep barns, silos and tractor sheds. There were tunnels that connected a number of these buildings. John showed me the trap doors in some of the sheds and barns that led to other areas on campus. This, of course, was golden knowledge for future sophomoric hijinks with fellow classmates.

As a part of the Oakland University campus, there was a mansion called Meadowbrook Hall. Matilda Dodge had left it to the University after her death, and it now functioned as a museum and meeting center. John and I used to do pick-ups and deliveries there as well as some general maintenance on the building itself. John told me that his father had been a caretaker at Meadowbrook when Mrs. Dodge (remarried as Wilson) was still living there. He showed me some of the secret rooms and passageways in that building as well. It was quite a lot of fun walking down hidden halls and popping out of darkened doors — I felt a little bit like I was in an episode of “Scooby Doo.”

As far as the work was concerned, I found the janitor job to be low-impact and laid-back. The best week I had on the job was when John and I were sent to a giant storeroom to do inventory. In the summer time, the Detroit Lions would use the campus as a training facility. The football players ate, slept and lived in the dorms. It was now our job to perform a count on all of the pillows and blankets used by the Lions during their stay at training camp. Imagine a 400 square foot storeroom filled with nothing but pillows and blankets, and your job is to count them all. I was expecting a long, boring morning of counting. John, on the other hand, entered the room and looked around slowly. After a few minutes of sizing up our task, he turned to me and said, “I would say that there are 1026 blankets and 2346 pillows here.” Without waiting for my response, he walked to a corner of the room, threw down about 30 pillows and flopped down. “Wake me for lunch.” was the last thing I heard before he shut his eyes. The beauty of simplicity. We spent the next three days “counting” pillows and blankets before the final tally was brought back to the office. We never told the supervisor that we had also been “counting sheep” as well.

Of course, being a student janitor left me open for general teasing and cat calling. I was labeled “Janitor Joe” very early on in my employment and was often subject to comments like, “You missed a spot” and “Can you do my room next?”

I quickly learned the best response was to hold up my massive ring of keys and reply ever so softly, with something like this:

“Hey, Gary, you know what these are for? These keys let me into any dorm room I want. I did notice that you got a new stereo the other day… If it goes missing, let me know.”.

It was this kind of subtle retort that quieted the maddening crowd almost immediately. After that, I never really had more problems with teasing.

Like any job, there was also a dark side to janitorial service. The clouds of dull gray and umber loomed every weekend when I was the only worker on campus, left alone for two days by the 9 to 5ers. At first, it seemed like a great deal: no supervisions and I got paid for 16 hours’ worth of work. All I had to do was to empty the garbage out of all of the dorms and haul it to the campus dump. Ah, but there was the rub…

As winter set in upon our northern campus, the winds whipped furiously across the hills of Rochester. It was at this point in November when my cushy on-campus job began to take a turn for the worse. As with most college students, weekends began on Thursday night and ran until Sunday afternoon. During that time, bars were visited, music was played, dances were danced, drinks were drunk and maidens were wooed. It was a known fact that hours of continuous revelry and merriment are not conducive to work or studying.

The only student janitors on weekends were a guy named Greg and myself. Now, Greg was a super-nice, quiet, unassuming guy. He would pick me up at 6:00 am every Saturday morning in the campus work truck right in front of my dorm. We would both begin the arduous task of moving from dorm to dorm, emptying out the trash bins from each “incinerator” room on every floor. If we worked quickly and efficiently, the whole job would take about 3-4 hours. Sounds pretty easy, right? Wrong! There were three problems with this work formula:

• Lack of sleep and interest
• Disgusting
• Too damn cold!

It was at this point in my career that I learned that the separation between human beings and common farm animals is not as distant as one might think. Each incinerator room was set up the same way; with two large steel drums meant for garbage disposal. There were some general rules about the types of garbage that was allowed to be left in these rooms. Without going into too much graphic detail, let’s just say that ordinary, everyday trash was acceptable. What was not acceptable were things like broken couches, soiled bed linen, dead hamsters, shards of window glass, and dried-out Christmas trees. Basically, anything that could not be carried down in freight elevator or represented potential bodily harm to the custodial staff was frowned upon. Of course, this did not deter anyone from emptying things like two tons of sand and a plastic kiddy pool left over from their Hawaiian beach party smack dab in the middle of our weekly trash load.

It was at this point in my career that I also became privy to a dark, forbidding secret, one that would stick with me the rest of my life. I learned that in the battle of co-ed community refuse, women’s trash smelled worse. Again, I will refrain from any graphic detail here, sparing you the reader the mental, emotional and psychological anguish I experienced from the handling of hair-clogged brushes, mascara and lipstick smeared tissues, trimmed painted toe nail clippings and discarded feminine hygiene products. Suffice to say, the incinerator rooms in the female dorms were a cross between a Hieronymus Bosch painting and an overturned cart of rotten produce.

Each week, every incinerator room became a source of mystery and adventure for us. It was a little like a macabre “Let’s Make a Deal” show where Greg and I would barter who would take Door #1 and who got stuck with Door #3. One week, I got stuck with Door #3. This was a floor notorious for their fascinating waste products. Prior to emptying their garbage that week, I had neglected to remember that this 7th floor group of gentlemen had sponsored a spook house a few weeks prior. Part of their haunting décor included a full-sized cow head brought from one of the student’s farm back home. Well, a prize like that was too interesting to just throw away after the Halloween holidays had past, so floor members had taken turns showing the cow’s head around for another couple of weeks. Finally, the novelty of a severed bovine cranium lost its luster, while the smell provided further motivation to dispose of the prize.

Suffice it to say I was not prepared when I opened Door #3. When I swung open the door of the incinerator room, I nearly keeled over from the fumes. I don’t know if you have ever smelled a mammal in various states of decay, but I would a challenge anyone to find a worse odor. Once the initial shock of the smell wore off, I still had to uncover where the source of the smell was. To my sheer delight I found the rotten cow’s head under some plastic garbage bags, staring up at me, eyes bulging and tongue hanging out with grotesque dopiness. It was at this point that Greg saved the day. When I showed him what I had found, he stated, “Man, that’s just wrong,” and proceeded to guide me to freight elevator empty-handed. I watched with great curiosity as Greg pulled a screwdriver out his back pocket and commenced to removing some screws from the elevator door. “Try it now”, Greg instructed me. I hit the elevator button and nothing happened. The elevator was broken. I looked back and Greg and he just smiled. You see, the rule was, we could only take out the garbage if the elevators were in working order. Since the rest of the maintenance staff was gone for the weekend, there would be no one to repair the elevator until Monday. This meant that the weekly staff would be stuck with unloading the cow’s head. Greg informed me after this episode that we could usually disable the elevators once a month without bringing any suspicion upon ourselves. The trick was to disable different elevators in different buildings at different times. That way, it looked like a general breakdown, as opposed to blatant sabotage. Of course, once Greg brought me into his little scam, I wanted to disable every elevator on every weekend and go back to bed. Thank goodness that his cooler head prevailed (most of the time).

My career as janitor ended quite early one cold and windy Saturday morning. After a long night of revelry and co-ed sleepovers, I was supposed to get up at 6:00 am for garbage detail. At 6:15 am Greg tried calling my room… I did not answer. At 6:20 am Greg tried calling my room again… I feigned sleepy ignorance. At 6:30 am, Greg banged on my room door… I abstained from answering. Despite all of Greg’s verbal and physical prodding, I could not bring myself to get out from under my warm comforter, or even answer his cries. By 6:45 am, Greg gave up and left under a flurry of expletives and curses. I, in turn, went back to sleep, knowing I had completely “pimped” my trash mate.

Later on that day, I called Greg’s room to explain that I had been at an overnighter in someone else’s room, which was of course a lie. I tripped over myself with apologies and excuses until Greg finally gave in and said it was OK. I did let him know that I would be resigning on Monday because I had gotten a new off-campus job. This was another lie, since I really had no other employment at that moment but just could not stand another day of mopping floors or hauling other people’s bodily waste around in a brown beat-up campus pick-up truck. Thus ended my brief stint as a custodial maintenance engineer.

So What Did I Learn?

The greatest thing I learned from being a dorm room janitor was humility. I used to look at guys (and gals) whose job it was to clean up after self-centered, collegiate chuckleheads with an air of superiority. I figured that I was going to school to avoid menial labor. I never gave it a second thought when I spit my gum out on the floor or left my cafeteria tray behind for someone else to clean up. However, once I was on the other side of the chewing gum, having to scrape gobs of it from under desks, chairs and couches in the commons room, I began to understand the human side of the job. Basically, I learned that there are no small jobs, only small people. The people I worked with at Oakland University showed me that pride and respect come from within. These people knew that the work they did was undesirable. But they also knew that they had families to take care of and obligations to be met. They came to work every day and did their job. That fact alone garners respect and admiration.

The other thing I learned from this experience was that misery loves company. Once I was brought into the fold of the custodial culture, I was privy to all of the secrets, inside jokes and general camaraderie between fellow workers. This feeling of acceptance and inclusion went a long way to making the job more bearable. Acceptance breeds a better attitude toward work and life in general. It is comforting to know that you are not alone in your struggles. It helps to know that others have trudged the path before you or are right along side for the ride.

The final, and most important thing that I learned was the importance of saying “No.” To this day, I still feel guilty about lying to Greg. He trusted me and counted on me and I let him down. If I could have told him the truth and said “No, I don’t want this job anymore,” he would have understood. Unfortunately, I lost track of Greg after that job and was never able to make amends for my shortcomings. I learned that a well-positioned “no” is always better than a poorly-placed “yes.” It takes as much strength and courage to leave a job as it does to stay in one you hate. You have to make a decision and be willing to live with the consequences. This means that you will have say “No” sometimes to people who do not want to hear it.