Custodian works hard with pleasure
Brandon Russell | Staff Writer
russelb3@imail.losrios.edu
Everyday, students leave behind personal items and garbage in classrooms sometimes where it belongs, other times not.
Trash and other articles don’t just pick themselves up at the end of the day and kindly find their way to the garbage can or lost and found. They are cleaned up or tossed out, courtesy of a custodian. It takes a special kind of person to tackle a custodian’s duties day in and day out. James Williams, 42, is one of those people — a City College custodian who has been working at this campus for over two years.
“I like my job – being a janitor. I’m not ashamed of it,” said Williams. “As a custodian, we’re concerned for everybody.”
Williams carried this same cheerful mentality throughout the course of his long shift, from 3:30 p.m. to midnight.
After assignments for the evening were issued in a brief meeting, Williams and I headed to the second
floor of the business building to begin his shift one night in early March.
For Williams, it was right down to business. Even before we reached our first stop, he had already started picking up trash left behind in the hallways.
“Humans have a tendency to forget about their trash it’s natural, so we’re here for backup,” said Williams.
The first order of business was to make sure that all of the uninhabited classrooms were locked and that the study stations in the hallways were trash free and dusted.
Once that was finished, Williams headed back to the custodial closet to get two large trash cans, one for recycling and the other for trash, a broom and a dustpan.
Williams’ next job was to thoroughly clean each of the classrooms.
He didn’t just have to sweep the floor and take out the garbage. Williams had to empty the pencil sharpeners, clean the chalkboards, dust the door frames, change any light bulbs that were out, adjust the doorway light switch so that flicking the switch up would turn the overhead lights on, and finally straighten the chairs, so that there was an unobstructed path to the disabled
students’ desks.
“This way the instructors have a clean area to work in and the students have a clean area to study in,” said Williams as we closed out one classroom and moved to the next.
I could tell Williams believed in the work he was doing. He wasn’t just going through the motions.
At around 5:30 p.m., when most people are just winding down from their work day, it seemed as if Williams was just warming up.
