I Was a Janitor

I was a janitor.

I am quite serious. My first full-time job was as a janitor. Actually, the job title was “porter”. I wasn’t a custodian or a janitor; I was a porter. It was a summer job in a rather posh department store that I got after high school. I had looked for a job for two weeks with absolutely no success. I don’t know why I walked into the personnel office of L.S. Ayres in Greenwood. I guess I was getting pretty desperate. I learned a pretty valuable lesson in acquiring that job. I learned that I wasn’t going to get far on a high school education. Others may have been very successful in having careers with only a high school education, but that route wasn’t going to work for me.

I learned a lot of things as a porter a/k/a janitor. I learned the discipline of hitting the time clock at 6:00 a.m. (Actually, I had to clock in within six minutes before six o’clock.) I learned the importance of developing a routine that made sense, like what things to clean first and what to put off until the very end of the routine. As a part of that I learned a principle called Economy of Motion. I learned about it on the job long before I studied it in a college management course. The store had three wings and was a total of a quarter-mile long. I learned how to clean restrooms. I cleaned a lot of restrooms. Since I was the new guy on the job I got to clean ALL the restrooms. There were eight of them spread throughout the department store. The women’s restrooms were always harder to clean than the men’s restrooms. Neither was pleasant.

I learned how to mop and vacuum floors and how to wash windows. I emptied a lot of trash cans and I learned how to run an industrial trash compactor. I learned how to clean up after sick customers and how to take care of poopy diapers. I learned how to clean under counter tops and on top of and inside of light fixtures. I also learned that in spite of what my name badge said on my shirt that my real name was Janitor, although long-time employees knew to call me by my real name, Porter. “Hey, Janitor, come here!” It bothered me at first until I learned that I was making more money than the store clerks.

My boss was one of the most honest, hard-working, diligent, fair men I have ever known. I would go back to work for him today (if I had to go back to work). He always smiled. He showed me my job and taught me the tricks of the trade. He bought me my lunch a couple of times and threw a party for me when I left at the end of the summer to return to school. Not that it matters, but Darrell Peoples was a black man—one of the finest men I have ever known. I learned something about being color blind that summer and I learned how mean-spirited people can be to a person’s face as well as behind a person’s back.

I learned the importance of working hard, showing up to work on time and volunteering to take on the harder tasks, but I didn’t learn that lesson until the following year when I returned home after that first year of college. I walked into the store to see old friends when the store manager asked me if I wanted a job for the summer. He walked me into the personnel office and told the personnel director (this was before they were called human resource managers) to hire me for the summer. The director said that there were no jobs available, whereupon the store manager said he didn’t care and to get me on the payroll. That scenario played out two more times when I was looking for a second job.

I am grateful that I was desperate enough to take that job as it opened doors to other jobs where I learned valuable lessons. I learned how to wash dishes in a campus cafeteria, and along with that I learned how much we appreciate people who have to scrape garbage from plates into trash bins. I learned that no matter how much protective clothing you put on that milk and water and juice and pudding and mixtures and unknown solutions created at the tables in the cafeteria will drip onto your shoes. A good pair of shoes might last a week before you don’t want to touch them. I learned that the smell of what you run through your hands on a daily basis is harder to remove than it is for people standing around you to remove themselves from your presence. I also learned that if you consistently show up to work on time and do your job effectively that other windows of opportunity appear. Thus it was that I learned how to cater banquets and ballgames and other special events.

I learned how to dig ditches in sub-zero weather. As part of that experience I learned that digging through the frozen ground was only slightly easier than running a Ditch Witch through a rock. I also learned that the best way to run a Ditch Witch through a rock is to turn it off and use a pick and a shovel to dig it out. There is no such thing as a small lava rock. I learned that it is possible to get very big bloody blisters even while wearing thick work gloves.

I learned a lot doing those jobs. I learned about the people doing those jobs, but more importantly I learned about the people who make life a little bit harder for those who are saddled with cleaning up life’s messes. The custodian who cleaned my office during my law enforcement career cried when I retired.