The Value of the University Maintenance Staff :: Informative Essays

Beep, beep, beep, smack. You wish you could hit the snooze button on your alarm because it’s 5 o’clock on a Monday morning. Part of you wants to sleep a few more hours, but the other part tells you it’s time to go to work. You eat breakfast, kiss your family goodbye, and arrive at the University campus in time to start your shift at 7 a.m. After seeing the friendly faces of your co-workers and friends on staff, you think to yourself, â€Å"Maybe today won’t be so bad after all.† Your mood changes when you see the mess that has been accumulating in the bathrooms over the weekend. Once you’ve opened the door, you grimace as you are taken aback by a familiar stench which you’ve come to recognize as a combination of alcohol, vomit, urine, and smelly garbage. The trash bag looks nearly empty, as it appears that most of the trash never made it there. In the girls’ bathrooms, the feminine disposals are overflowing, and there is hair all over the floor and in the showers. In the boys’ bathrooms, the showerheads are missing, the drains are clogged, and you sigh as you dread looking into the bathroom stalls. Sure enough, one toilet is completely clogged, another one is plastered with vomit, most likely from someone’s poor decision to drink the night before, and the floor of the third stall is covered with wet toilet paper, a mess that you’re not surprised to find after looking in the first two stalls. What seems like hours later, once the bathrooms are spotless again, students begin to come in to use the showers and restrooms, unaware of the mess that was there a few hours earlier. The students have failed to realize the mess that was left, because they have taken for granted that the bathrooms will be clean when they use them. As the students shower, you return to the utility closet to grab the tools you need for your next chore. You are stunned when you read the obscene message a student left for you on your dry erase board. You feel like this is a slap in the face after you just spent your whole morning cleaning up their messes. Though this description is hypothetical, these events are based on stories told by JMU housekeeping employees.