Linda Wright has worked the graveyard shift for Custodial Services of the University of Oregon for 25 years.
During her shift, Wright’s voice is bright and cheerful. Her laughter is infectious and cuts through the heavy silence of nighttime.
“One year on the first floor of Straub Hall — it must have been room 146 — somebody brought in a giant sheet cake and hit it with a weed eater. Literally. There was cake all over the ceiling and the chalkboards and it was everywhere,” Wright says. “There was carpeting on the floor, so a lot of the cleaning was just first vacuuming it and going over and extracting the bad spots. On the walls, it was mostly wiping it off and the same with the ceiling — just got a ladder and a broom and brushed it off as best you could and then took a wet cloth to it and wiped off what needed to be wiped. Most of it came right off because by the time we found it, it was pretty well dry. It probably took, oh, a couple hours for two to three people. That was about 18 to 20 years ago, I think.”
Now the Operations Manager for the department, she sees fewer things like sheet cake massacres and spends more time overseeing and assisting two supervisors and about 50 custodians, but her workday still starts at 10 p.m. and ends at 7 a.m.
“The first thing I do is get here and go get the coffee,” she says, laughing.
Wright’s favorite part of her job is running the new employee orientation for custodial workers. Unlike what one would expect for a person who works the overnight shift, she loves meeting new people and talking with them.
“I get to share my experience and give them tips on how to sleep during the day,” she says,
chuckling again.
Wright’s experience is extensive. She jokes that custodians share war stories with one another, and after hearing some of the things she’s seen, “war stories” seems like the
appropriate term.
She’s seen what happens when someone uses the ninth floor stairwell of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall as a restroom, how the urine spreads down the walls, railings and stairs.
She’s seen how a group of custodians tackles and sanitizes nine flights of stairs from top to bottom within hours.
She’s seen the wit of the architecture students in Lawrence Hall, with shopping carts magically appearing on the roof and nail gun strips super glued point-up to the toilet seats in a men’s restroom.
And, above all else, she’s seen human feces on almost every seemingly unlikely spot on campus: elevators, armchairs, chalkboards.
“It’s really hard work. People think it’s easy, that we’re just custodians and all we do is clean up. It’s not that easy,” she says, especially when the same room you scrubbed the night before looks like you were never there by the next evening.
Wright still loves her job, despite the frustrations, and explains that custodians are as proud of supporting University students as the rest of the staff and faculty is, which is why they
continue to clean and re-clean the same 35,000 to 40,000 square feet every night of
every week.
“When you leave that room, you know that it’s clean and it looks good and is ready for the students. We are here for the students. A lot of us take pride in their work so that the students have a clean atmosphere to come and learn in,” she says.
Occasionally someone will leave a complimentary note for a custodian who did a spectacular job cleaning an area or building, and Wright says those are always appreciated.
“Those are the nice things to find,” she says, laughing again.
Wright enjoys her work with a good group of people. But there is one thing that peeves Wright and, if students changed one simple habit, could save the custodians considerable time and effort in the dead of night.
“One of the biggest things that we have to pick up a lot is newspapers. Like the Emerald, ” she says, chuckling. “It lays around all over the place … there’s papers and coffee cups and soda cans (students) just leave lying around. If they could carry the trash out with them, that would really help.”