Custodians are much more important than most people think. It’s a lot harder work than just cleaning up stray papers in the hallway. The man you see walking down the hallway with a Microfiber cleansing cloth is one of the biggest aspects in the school. The group of people who refill the Paper towel dispenser and Automatic soap dispenser aren’t nobodies. If you didn’t have janitors in a school, it couldn’t function. It’s arguable that janitors are more important than principals or teachers alike. They do jobs that no else would ever do but jobs that people demand be done.
It is imperative that schools is clean. Just as a restaurant gets a sanitation score, so does a school and if it doesn’t pass, kids can’t come to school. Imagine how many things in a school can be messy and unsanitary. There are locker rooms, wrestling mats, cafeterias, bathrooms and classrooms. Imagine how dirty locker rooms can get. You have showers and lockers that teenager leave things in. Wrestling rooms get extremely dirty as well. When the staff infection MRSA was on the rise, wrestling mats were much to blame. Without a custodian doing their job,a student could get harmed by something.
Janitors are just once example of groups of people who get taken for granted in the work force. Often the jobs that we don’t acknowledge are the most important. So many of us go about our day and don’t realize how many of the things we expect to be done or ready are that way due to someone else. When you go into the office and fill up that coffee cup, do we think of who had it washed and ready for us? When we walk to our cubicle across the floor that was littered with post-it notes yesterday, it is rare that we notice that someone took the time to clean it up. We seem to have this delusional mindset that these things just naturally happen.
Ignoring these small underdogs isn’t ethical. The people who work these jobs often work extremely odd and long hours. Maids and custodians don’t make a lot of money and work extremely hard. It is emotionally draining to work these jobs and never get any relief. It is like the example of constantly giving and never getting anything in return. Working these jobs can make people feel inconsequential and bad about themselves.
Next time you’re walking down the hallway at school or work, take a second and think about the person who made it the way it was. You should realize that it doesn’t just happen. It takes an immense amount of work to keep a house or office building running. The people who clean and organize a business are they ones who make it run. There would be no business without people like this.
