They’re not your personal cleaners
By Jessica Berget, Opinions Editor
One time I was at the food court in a mall with my friend at the time. After we had finished eating and were about to leave, I reminded her that she forgot to pick up after herself, to which she replied, “Just leave it. That’s the custodians’ job.”
First of all, no it’s not. Second of all, how lazy and immature can you be that you can’t even clean up after yourself?
Unfortunately, many people have this same idea about cleaners, believing that they are getting paid to personally clean up after every person who walks through the building, but they’re not. It may be the cleaners’ job to keep the area neat and tidy, but it’s not their job to clean up every individual person’s mess. In fact, by leaving your garbage behind, you are probably making their jobs even more difficult. They likely have other duties that need to be done besides cleaning up after some lazy punks’ lunch, and you’re wasting their time because you couldn’t pick up your own garbage.
I can’t imagine how custodians deal with this on a daily basis, having to handle people who assume their mess is someone else’s responsibility. When I worked at a movie theatre, I would have to help clean out the theatres before the next showing, so I have some understanding of the plight of janitors. The amount of mess that people left behind was amazing—but also concerning considering many of the movie patrons were fully grown adults who couldn’t tidy up after themselves. Being a cleaner is a hard job, but it shouldn’t be harder because some people are too lazy to throw their own garbage away.
People tend to look down on custodians, but their jobs are important and should not be taken for granted. Clean up after yourselves—it’s not that hard.
