By Larry Shurilla
Teaching is not a thankless job. The kids bring you notes, drawings, and gifts on occasion and many parents express thanks for your efforts in teaching their children. In fact, there is a whole week devoted to thanking teachers-Teacher Appreciation Week in May! Now custodians, on the other hand, do not receive the thanks they deserve.
As teachers pack up for the summer months and get ready for a break, the custodians are ramping up for major summer cleaning and building projects. Teachers, and the public at large, don’t realize the nearly miraculous fete of thoroughly cleaning, painting, repairing and updating 7 schools in our district in roughly 2.5 months, all the while working around summer school and summer teacher inservice activities!
I was one of those teachers who taught summer school in the morning and then worked with the custodians in the afternoons. I would paint the halls of our middle school after summer school let out and by doing so, I got to see much of the work custodians did behind the scenes.
Taking care of a school is much like taking care of a home, just on a larger scale. There is a constant battle between maintenance and finding better ways to do things. Heating and air-conditioning problems, electrical work, plumbing work, meeting room set-ups, and the relentless classroom and floor cleaning are just some of the activities custodians do all the time.
From my own experience, I saw an interesting dichotomy in the educational workplace. Either teachers and administrators treated the custodians with respect or they pretty much ignored them. From my own experience, I loved working with the custodians. I was a custodian. A new teacher to our building, who was a tad aloof and grumpy, first saw me as I was painting the hallways during the summer. When she saw me seated with a bunch of other teachers at the first faculty meeting of the new school term, she thought, “What’s he doing here?! They let custodians sit in on faculty meetings?!” I had a lot of fun with that one for a long time. Still do.
Custodial work is not easy. Just try replacing your own kitchen faucet sprayer, when you have 2 inches of work space behind your sink and three inches of fingers. You get my point. After a few years of summer painting by myself or with student helpers, I convinced a fellow teacher that summer painting was not such a bad gig. It was only four or five hours a day in a mostly air-conditioned working environment. We could listen to music, drink Mountain Dew, etc. Well, he bit, and we became a painting team. The very first day he joined me, I was so excited to show him the ropes. I loaded up the rolling scaffolding cart with all the necessary materials: paint, screwdrivers, blue tape, paint-splattered radio, five-in-one tool, FPMD (Full Power Mountain Dew-all sugar, all caffeine), etc. I laid down the red rubber painting tarp in the hallway, pulled out a few brushes, filled the roller tray with fresh white paint, all the while briefing him from my vast knowledge on the basic practices of professional painting. I then proceeded to step backwards onto the roller tray and splash a gallon of white paint all over the terrazzo floor, onto my pant leg, and halfway up the adjacent lockers! Thus ended my first and last painting lesson.
No, custodial work is not easy. It’s kind of like screaming at the refs during a basketball game. With our instant and super-slow-motion replays on tv, we think it’s so easy and we know all the calls. Until you’ve officiated anything, just hold off on your criticism. Put on a whistle and try to make any kind of call on the court, live. It is quite difficult. Same with custodial work. Until you’ve grabbed a broom, paint brush, or screwdriver and done it yourself, hold off on your criticism of others.
Custodians work hard day after day and I think they enjoy seeing frazzled teachers buried behind mounds of paperwork at their desks after the end of the working day. It reminds them they don’t have to interact with people too much on the night shift, and when the clock hits eleven, they’re going home with nothing under their arms. Every job has its advantages and disadvantages.
Having spent many a summer afternoon rolling paint onto what seemed like endless hallway walls, you can imagine that the mind can drift a bit. As a matter of fact, the mind screams for activity and like a weed sprouting up from a crack in the middle of a Walmart parking lot, humor finds a way to make tiresome tasks palatable. Custodians like to have fun and ribbing each other is prerequisite for the job.
One communication technique I learned working with the full-time custodians was to assume your buddies know less about repairing a problem than you do. You could hear things like, “What on earth are you doing?! Here, let me show you how to do that!” or “Where’d you learn how to do that, in the circus?” It’s fun to act like you’re the expert and no one wanted to admit they didn’t know how to do something like fixing drinking fountain valves or replacing ceiling tiles. This attitude brought about many moments of humor, especially when “the expert” took over and quickly proceeded to screw the job up worse than it was before. Even then, you could always blame it on the district! “Why doesn’t the district ever buy top-of-the-line tools?! Always skimpin’ on the budget. Damn crapperware!” Even with the joking and maybe because of the ribbing, the fountains always got fixed and the ceiling tiles were seamlessly replaced.
I experienced the lack of respect custodians may feel from time to time and I’m as altruistic as the next teacher, but even I have my limitations. Case in point…one fine summer afternoon, whilst in the middle of painting the wood shop walls, a parent of one of our former students caught my painting companion and I in the doorway as she was showing her daughter her new locker and practicing combinations. She was surprised to see us in painting clothes and wielding brushes. The conversation went something like this:
“Hi Mr. Shurilla and Mr. Schmidt. You guys paint here during the summer?”
“Why yes, we do!”
“Well, I guess that gets you up and keeps you busy!”
“Sure does.”
“Do you get paid for this?”
An awkward pause and moment of silence.
“As a matter of fact, yes. Yes we do.”
“Awesome. Have a great year. Bye!”
Perhaps I am too small. Perhaps my ego wouldn’t fit, even in a distorting circus mirror. Perhaps Mother Theresa’s picture doesn’t hang in my hallway at home, but come on here, folks. “Do you get paid for this?!”
“No, I don’t get paid for this! Are you kidding?! Who would pay to have this done?! I don’t have anything better to do on summer afternoons than haul around ladders and tape the bottom edges of endless hallways. I love rolling and brushing miles of paint. Paid for it? Well, maybe if Charles Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie bartered with me, I might paint in exchange for a pork butt, but money? No way! You love it when you get the chance to paint a room at home, don’t you?! Well, how blessed am I?! I get to paint classrooms and hallways every day! Paid for it? Just to slap on paint?! No way, my friend. I’m better than that.”
I am not better than that. Put me in a donkey suit and spray paint “Cheap O” on my side, but I actually expect to be paid for my efforts. Teaching and painting are work, people! During the school year, we would often use the phrase, “Do you get paid for that?” whenever work of a dubious nature came up, like coaching, tutoring, teaching, hauling bricks, rocketing to the moon, or being elected President of the United States, etc. You get the picture.
The sanctity of break time to a custodian is akin to a mother rabbit protecting her fuzzy newborns from a circling red-tailed hawk. Do not mess with our break! That fifteen-minute period of peace seemingly affords the only buffer between sanity and lunacy, between congeniality and hostility, and ultimately between “Okay, I’ll do it” or “That’s beyond my pay grade!”
One could be moving radioactive plutonium into a lead containment vessel, but if the break whistle blew, you’d drop that canister then and there, and rush to the break room for a few pretzel rods and a Diet Coke. Plutonium be damned!
The only possible way that break time could be shortened would be if you were sitting around a table in the break room, playing Star Trek Uno, sipping your soda, and then the boss walks in. We’d get back to work faster than cockroaches scattering when you turn on the light!
Since I’m speaking of break time, let me entertain you with a joke my dad told me many years ago when I was a kid and has been repeated ad nauseam in the Shurilla family ever since. It contains a punchline that works in the custodial world quite nicely and just about any other occupation. The joke goes something like this:
One day a very bad man, Mr. Walker, died and went straight to Hell (he must not have been a teacher because they didn’t give him his “ignoring kids” video first). Upon entering Hades, he met The Devil who was more than happy to greet him.
“Welcome to Hell, Mr. Walker!” spewed Satan. “Ya know this place isn’t as bad as people make it out to be.”
“Really?” questioned our malignant sinner, suspiciously.
“Most certainly,” replied Beelzebub. “As a matter of fact, we here in the Pernicious Inferno believe in free choice! You believe in free choice, don’t you, Mr. Walker?”
“Why yes, yes I do!”
The Devil coughed. “Well then, let me present you with three choices. You see before you three doors. Behind each door is a Personal Hell designed with you in mind. You may choose which door of Hell to enter.”
“Wait a minute here, Satan. It’s no choice if I don’t know what’s behind the doors!”
“Right you are, my bad man, right you are. But in today’s Hell, we are much more politically correct. In the old days, we’d just have you guess your door and ‘Poof!’ off you’d go to oblivion, but not in this day and age. I will personally open each door of Hell for you, let you take a look inside, and then you may select the door of your choosing.”
“I don’t know, Lucifer. This kind of has a Twilight Zone like feel to it.”
“Well, Mr. Walker, you have some choice here, but you don’t have much choice now, do you? You are in Hell after all! Would you prefer I make the choice for you?”
“Ahh, no, no, that sounds like a bad idea. Go ahead. Show me Door #1.”
“As you please.”
The Devil opened Door #1 to reveal a scene of fire and brimstone, with numberless bodies tied to wooden posts, burning to death, shrieking, and writhing in agony!
“Close the door! Close the door!” shouted our sinner in horror. “That was terrible!”
“So say they all,” quipped Satan and eagerly added with a sinister smile, “Here’s Door #2!”
Door #2 opened to a man screaming, strapped to a hospital gurney, while seven ghouls, each with a different size knife, were playfully carving his flesh without any anesthetic.
“Shut the door! Shut the door!”
“Of course. Of course. Now, are you ready for Door #3, Mr. Walker?”
“Somehow, I don’t think I’ll ever be ready. Go ahead, Devil. Do your stuff.”
Door #3 creaked open to expose a host of poor souls standing amid a football field-sized pool of fecal matter that came right up to their chins. Only their heads showed. The Devil’s minions patrolled outside the pool. The smell was overwhelmingly vile and putrid, but there was no screaming. The Devil shut the door.
“Well,” Mr. Walker began, “I definitely don’t want Door #1 or Door #2. There’s just too much suffering there. Door #3 is no picnic, but I guess it’s the least of three evils.”
“A wise choice, befitting your crimes, Mr. Walker. You may enter Door #3 and take your place alongside your fellow sinners.”
Mr. Walker stepped gingerly into the putrid pool of raw sewage and stood at attention, stiff and rigid, with his chin just above the foul mess. He thought for a moment, “Ya know? This isn’t that bad.”
Just then, Satan came in grinning, looked at his watch and said, “Break’s over. Back on your knees.”
Imagine the good-natured ribbing you would endure if ever you were caught resting in the hallways by a couple of custodians, shouting a salvo of “Break’s over. Back on your knees” imperatives your way. Ahh, what a fun-loving bunch!
Another interesting anomaly of the summer custodial work force were the high school kids who signed on as summer helpers. I dubbed them, “The Walkers.” Now these walkers have nothing to do with the previously mentioned, Mr. Walker. No sir, these “Walkers” were more of TV’s The Walking Dead kind of walkers. You know, the head twisted zombies, roaming through vacant city streets, …that kind of walker. Well, in the middle school summer work force, young walkers were aplenty.
The high school summer staff, just like any work force, exhibited all the working traits you see in adults. Some were born leaders. Some followers. Some worked their butts off and others just wanted to get work done and go swimming. I certainly didn’t blame them for that, but back to the walkers.
It would begin simple enough. As the clock inched toward 1:50 p.m., the walkers would begin to appear, slowly coming out of darkened classrooms or dimly lit hallways. Their walk would be stilted and their cell phones illuminated their blank, expressionless faces. An occasional grunt, groan, or giggle could be heard as the devices pleased or angered them.
The walkers would sometimes randomly converge and bounce off each other in the hallways, like bumper cars at an amusement park, all the while their collective movement hypnotically leading them to the break room and the 2:30 p.m. sign-out sheets. Since my painting cohort and I usually painted until around 3:30 p.m., we could gauge the time of day to the minute by the first walker appearance. “There’s a walker now, Paul, must be 1:50.” Or perhaps we would overhear one of the custodial walkie-talkie’s blast, “There’s been a walker sighting in central hall; synchronize your watches accordingly.”
Al McGuire, the legendary basketball coach of Marquette University and NBC Sports analyst, once spoke of the need for making “a right turn” in life. You see, McGuire lived in the suburbs of Milwaukee in a town called Brookfield. Day after day for thirteen years, McGuire would take a left turn out of his affluent subdivision and head to downtown Milwaukee to coach the Warriors. I guess many of us make a similar, monotonous day-to-day drive to work each day. We just put our brains on auto-drive and after a half hour or so we arrive. But every now and then, McGuire quipped, “we need to make a right turn.” Instead of that left turn toward town and work, make a right and go somewhere you’ve never been before. Go out into the country and meet people. Talk to farmers sitting on their tractors in the fields. Talk to shop owners and people in the streets. McGuire said if you really want to get to know people, become a bartender or a cab driver; that’s where you get a degree in life. He said, “If you really want to know what’s going on at a place, get to know the custodians.” In fact, when McGuire was diagnosed with leukemia, he said he went to a hospital, found a custodian, and asked, “What am I in for?”
I relate to that kind of grassroots wisdom. When I was growing up, my dad (a Marquette grad himself) was a television repairman and one day he asked if I wanted to come with him to Al McGuire’s house to return his fixed TV set. You bet I did! All I remember was that Al wasn’t home, but I did get to look at all the MU pictures on the wall, meet his kind wife, and get a feel that this was truly, a down to earth family.
Most teachers don’t get the opportunity to work with the custodians they see everyday, busily cleaning and maintaining a safe learning environment for the kids, but I did. I guess it was like taking that right turn, getting out of my everyday grind to experience another’s. My time as a custodian taught me many lessons, most notably work hard, work as a team, find a better way and have fun doing it. I guess, in a way, we were both custodians of education. And get this…I even got paid for it!