Book Excerpt: That’s custodial technician to you, big guy

by ALISTAIR BOMPHRAY & JESSE SCACCIA

You’ve got five minutes until class starts. You forgot your keys, and this being an inner-city school, the doors are always locked. Your kids need the whole class period to finish their standardized test. If you don’t get that door unlocked, your department head will be breathing fire.

What do you do?

And no, building a hobo fire and roasting marshmallows on the ends of number two pencils just won’t cut it. You need help. You need someone to unlock that door. Like, now.

Have you hugged a janitor lately?

Janitors are at the bottom of the school hierarchy. They break their backs day after day cleaning up after ungrateful students, dutifully following in the wake of self-absorbed a-holes who shamelessly leave their crap everywhere. And sometimes amongst all the crap students leave behind is—gross, I know—literally  crap.

So that’s one reason to be nice to your school’s maintenance staff.

The other reason is you need them. They will help you in a pinch. Like now, when the only thing that can save you from a formal incompetence write-up is your friendly neighborhood janitor.

Need extra desks because you’re at 40 students the first week? Someone sharpies a gang sign on your door? Forget your keys because you left them in the back of a cab at the end of an awesome/sad match.com date? You know who to call.

Trust me. When that janitor saves your butt, man, you’ve never seen an unshaven 55-year-old Marlboro Red-smoking dude hugging a mop look like such an angel.

You’ll want to endear yourself to other non-teaching employees at your school too. Like the secretary, the one who can act like she misplaced your final grade slips when you’re really just a day late. The one who gives you the straight scoop on what teachers might be transferred to another school. And who, should your name come up, informally lobbies the principal to keep you around.

And don’t go forgetting about the librarian now. Get her to like you, and your textbook sign-out paperwork might just get eliminated. You can sit back and laugh while your fellow newbie teachers, the ones who ignore the non-teaching staff, have to do 20 one-handed push-ups while humming the Inspector Gadget theme in order to get a few extra copies of Macbeth.

Okay, this is Interpersonal Relations 101. But many new teachers are so overwhelmed that they forget to be a good person to their colleagues. Thank yous will make your life easier. So will asking about the secretary’s grandchildren. And remembering a birthday. It’s not rocket science.