friends

friends

Sleeping Jeremy

[	website	\|	Jeremy Bushnell	]
[	userinfo	\|	livejournal userinfo	]
[	archive	\|	journal archive	]

shirtwork: UofI med labs

[Jul. 9th, 2009|11:24 pm]

anaskyfish

January 1996. I got fired from Target, which was good as I am not naturally good at selling people shit they don't need, and so I started working custodial in Gilmore Hall, which was undergoing a lot of construction at the time, and that was a pretty easy gig: I'd check in across the way in the basement of Calvin Hall, and me and another guy (whose name I can't remember now, but he was pretty cool -- we were both "put on your headphones and zone out" types) cleaned the building. I think this was about nine until two or so, and I mostly swept/scrubbed floors and did some vacuuming classrooms, which is the stuff I like (the stuff I don't like is bathrooms and glass) and it went well for a few months while I was in school. The other big plus was I could walk to work, as I only lived a few blocks west. During this time my housing situation became unreasonable and I moved into the Riverhouse Co-op (which is now a frat) which was a mistake, I'll just say that. Anyway, this meant I lived even closer to work, so the first few months of 1996 went pretty well, writing a lot and occasionally going to class and bumming around with Kyra a lot. The guy I worked with decided he wanted more hours, so they moved me to another building across the river in the Bowen Science Building. As you can imagine, the Riverhouse Co-op was right on the river, so this was still a short walk, and ended up being a few more hours, which I was pretty happy about as the less time I spent at the co-op the better. Bowen is (I think) six stories tall, and basically each floor has its own custodian (with two custodians who only did bathrooms), which suited me pretty well as I figured I wouldn't have to work with anybody, but Dave (my boss) started me out working with an older guy until I "got the ropes". That shit sucked. I don't want to get into too many details, but the guy I worked with seemed pretty friendly so we went and did bathrooms and trash and he'd talk about whatever, so I was obligated to not wear my headphones, but what the hell. After a while he said it was time for a break, and you don't need to tell me twice about taking a break, so we're sitting down in one of the offices and he starts talking about how he thinks one of the other custodians is cute, and I kinda just say whatever, and he seems to be getting more and more into this idea, and I realize he's masturbating. This was unreasonable, and I told Dave I wasn't having it, and he gave me my own floor where I didn't have to do bathrooms. I suspect he knew this was going to happen, as he didn't seem to shocked about it.

There were a few really cool things about this job: first, I got an elevator key to go to the sub-basement, and I have a knowledge of that building that most people who work there will never have (seeing the backstage areas of a building is always awesome), and since I did recycling for my floor (which meant taking a huge blue wheeled bin in a loop around the floor and filling it with paper and magazines and slides and ephemera) which I'd rifle through before dumping it in the recycle dumpster for collage material. That said, working cleanup in a medical building has obvious downsides: I had to get OSHA trained to dispose of medical waste (don't tell my current boss I have this, as I'd like to avoid doing it at my current job) which meant taking red biohazzard bags filled with sketchy material down to the incinerator, and after the initial novelty of working the incinerator wore off this was officially the worst regular part of my job. There was some animal experimentation on my floor, and while none of it was particularly heinous it never sat well with me. That said, I did get to wax the floors of the autopsy lab a couple times, which was an interesting experience (autopsy cadavers, I discovered, have their heads and hands wrapped in gauze so they can't be identified by students), and just generally got to see all sorts of things I had never seen before, which was good prep for some of my later shitjobs like exterminator and meat packing custodial and gravedigger.

When you work custodial at a place for more than a month you start to really learn a lot about the people who work there, more than you ever really wanted to know -- remember that bit in The Breakfast Club where the janitor talks about how he knows about all the students? That's totally accurate. Most of the people were gone by the time we started, but in a lab there's always a couple people working late, and interacting with them was always interesting -- sometimes they're really overly friendly (particularly at a place like the University of Iowa, which is a pretty liberal place, so there's always people happy to converse with the proletariat), sometimes they're really pissed that you're intruding on their property (with those people I usually just didn't clean that space that night, which worked out best for everybody), sometimes they just pretend you're not there (which is fine, since that meant I could just listen to tapes -- I started making an early version of Teraphim Mystery Recording tapes around this time so I had endless drones to listen to at work). I would fight occasional boredom with pointless headtrips like organizing the pushpins in the bulletin boards in patterns or writing screwy messages on the whiteboards or putting up some of my Cult of the Yellow Sign flyers among the notices for department hirings and upcoming biology conferences, and it seems like people were generally okay with this so long as I kept it low profile.

(more soon)

Advertisement