My Thoughts on the Custodial Arts

I should spend more time being thankful (to whomever) for the position I have reached in my life. I am fortunate enough to be paid to use my brain for a living. I work with computers, so I spend the majority of my time sitting at a desk, typing. It's really the job I was meant to have; even as a high school student I spent my summers doing data entry while my brother and my friends washed dishes and mowed lawns. Not to discount that, it's fine for a great many people. Just not me.

Where I work, like where most people work (hopefully), there are janitors. They are an odd lot, especially in my current place of employment. There's one bald janitor with a perpetual goofy smile on his face. He re-enacts this conversation approximately 350 times per day.

Worker: "Hey, Robert, how are you?"
Janitor: "I'm getting there! Not sure where there is though!"

This joke repeats itself like the Zapruder film scene from the movie "JFK." Again and again, all day. I only say hello to Robert. I refuse to ask him how he's doing and participate in his little yuk-fest.

There was another bald janitor here who had a bicycle decorated as a shrine to the late Thurman Munson, complete with photos, statistics, and even a little statue of him. This guy was constantly muttering to himself. He no longer works here, I suspect that he is crying somewhere in an Ohio cornfield.

My theory was that the two bald janitors were cyborg creations of one of the researchers here, a bald fellow himself who I was told studies artificial intelligence. He keeps trying to clone himself, my theory supposes, but got one clone too happy, another too surly, and so on. I'm looking forward to the sneezy and bashful bald janitor clones.

Then there's another janitor who reminds me of Shrek. He keeps giving me the prison yard love stare. I can't help but feel like he's looking at me in an attempt to magically transform my life into his and his into mine, like that movie with Jodie Foster and her mom from the 1970s (which sucked) or the movie with Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore from the 1980s (which also sucked). So far his efforts to go all "switcheroo" on me have failed. AHA!

Not sure where I'm going with this, really. Pick up your own trash, give these guys a break, or they'll haul you off to their basement and put you in a bell jar.