This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor.

Quoted from an unknown source on the internet.

Upon reading this story from a friend on a different forum, I found myself at a lost of words to describe my thoughts and emotions.

Every day we complain how tough or how meaningless our job is, and every day we run away from challenges and standards that are easily within our grasp if we bother to spend a minute to look for them. No sounds can reflect how small I feel in the shadow of giants like her. No words can express how much I learned from a story like this.

No words, except those of Abraham Lincoln, who once said,

“Get the books, and read and study them. It did not matter, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

Thats an interesting story.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

that IS a really great story, and very inspiring. It really sends the right message to be positive and everything will turn out okay.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

An interesting story. Sounds like a Japanese twist of George Washington cutting down a cherry tree to get his football back (because he could not tell a lie - and apparently he could not climb a tree either).

You would have to completely drain the water from a toilet (including the water in the trap) and sterilize it (steam?) to make it sanitary enough to drink from, other wise you could get gastrointestinitous, ecoli, or a number of other infectious diseases

like I said, this sounds like a political/history hero myth/story. Cutting down a cherry tree to get your ball back (instead of climbing it) shows poor judgment, no matter how honest you are

and a good janitor should not need to drink from a toilet to prove to a manager they have a positive attitude.

I like inspirational stories. I like them even more when they are true (or make sense :^) Why wasnt the 65 year old janitor who drank from the toilets every day promoted to prime minister of Japan? After his whole life, he was still a janitor!

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

I like it

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

Oh you caught me there. Now that I think of it, what are the chances this is another one made up by someone on the internet modified, edited and passed around a million times until I recently see it on a chinese forum of a friend of mine?

I will edit out the "true story" part and put it in chit chat... But maybe the truth of it is not as important as what we got out of the story. Oh, I don't know, and it can go either way, but I thought it was a pretty good story.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

The basis of the story is correct, you need to be willing to start at the bottom and embrace the most demeaning jobs if you want to be a leader.

I saw a video about a man who wanted to help out a neighbor - his neighbor was a crazy old hermit who lived alone, acted bizzare, and everyone in the area was afraid of him. The man decided to befriend this outcast.

Long story => short the neighbor was mentally ill and really did need help. Over a period of sevearl months he helped him in many ways, getting him to take showers, buying him new clothes, taking him to get his haircut, cleaning up his house for him...

the connection here was the day he decided to clean his bathroom for him, and was face to face with a toilet that had not been cleaned in 10 years. That was the real test - that was the point where he almost threw up his hands and said "screw it!"

But once he got past it - everything else was easy. With his help the hermit got the medication he needed, the human connection he needed, and instead of being that weird old guy who lives on the corner, he was transformed into an accepted and respected elderly member of the neighborhood.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

good story but to clean and completly disinfect the toilet in a manner that was safe to drink from that didnt take too long...wouldnt that require chemicles thus making the water again unsanitary??

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

You know, you aren't necessarily going to get sick from drinking out of a (recently-flushed) toilet—it's tap water, plus a small quantity of filth. Besides, dogs do it all the time, and don't fall ill. Plus, you have an immune system for a reason.

It's essentially a fable: the story is about the symbolism, not the actual efficacy of some janitor's particular method of cleaning toilets. (And besides, the source is unknown—it might as well be an outright fabrication.)

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

You know, I saw a story on Oprah the other day that drinking toilet water out of any given toilet is more sanitary than the ice cubes from fast food restaurants. Less germs...

Interesting story though, sometimes you have to put up with the rain to see the rainbow

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

I find that hard to accept. The drain pipe in a toilet is S-shaped, the trap that prevents sewer gas from entering the room is under or behind the toilet bowl.

It is impossible to clean the S shaped trap (you cant even see it), and the water inside the bowl stays in contact with the water in the trap.

Dogs do drink from toilets, they also lick their butts, and they lick the faces of some dog owners

and people do get ecoli and other infectious diseases, and infect other people (esp if they happen to work in a resturant, food market...)

How they got sick in the first place? Who knows for sure? No matter how you look at it, slurping out of a toilet used by strangers sounds like a bad idea.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

The follow-on story is that she died of typhus. :)

Everyone needs to start with a scut job that they take seriously. I had to do a really large number of disgusting things as a box boy at Albertson's back at the dawn of time, but one of the ones that really stands out in my mind is the time a clerk knocked over a stack of 1-quart jars of kosher dill pickles. You haven't lived until you've cleaned up 28 quarts of pickles mixed with broken glass. (Of course, broken mustard and mayonnaise jars are harder to clean up, but I never had to deal with 28 quarts of mayonnaise.)

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

Here is a website that talks of the experiment. It was a seventh grader who did a science project, and after collecting samples send them to a science lab.

Click here to see the hits by googling it. They are pretty much all the same.

But that's besides the point. The moral behind the story is the point. It's about caring for what you do, no matter how important it may seem.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

25 years I befriended a married couple from another country. They were both teachers in the small community where I lived. One evening they invited me to their home and taught me how to make one of their traditional meals. As we cooked, they shared some of their thoughts and beliefs. The mother of one of the teachers had swept floors for a living all of her life. The brooms were handmade from straw and the floors swept were dirt floors. Together the husband and wife told me that in their culture, it was the respect for the job itself that brought dignity to the worker. Their whole community believed that way and they missed it in our community.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

Yeh the story was on ABC a while ago or something... done by some intermediate school girl..

Also I agree.. Its not really the story that matters, its the Moral of the story...


Pavan

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

chemicals in the water, symbolism of story, ecoli, etc. this is why i love Chief delphi.
Cool story.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

youd be getting sick from the chemicles used to clean the toilet...even if it was 100% remived of and bacteria or virus using chemicles and the water was 100% pure clean tap water you still just used TOILET BOWL cleaner which is not one of the lesser abrasive chemicles know to man

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

which moral? what about the old janitor? Drinking from the toilet was his thing - the girl copied the idea from him, then she does a total brown nose job and does it in front of the hotel manager, and SHE gets promoted.

What do you call someone who steals someone elses idea and benefits greatly from it?

(thats the problem with most fables -when you dig a little below the surface you find another layer of human nature that is not so pretty :^)

If I was the old janitor I would have stuffed her head in a toilet until:

1. She drank ALL the water or
B. The bubbles stopped coming up! :ahh:

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

You guys think is bad. I found someone who had it much worst. He was homeless but ended up getting hired as an engineer because of an idea he had while he was homeless. http://www.history channel.com/invent/?page=semifinalists_westcottI've actually done worst at Target but I won't go into the disgusting details. Also, no amount of cleaning can compare to the realization that everything you did last week at work needs to be done again. I was so happy that the data I processed for this experiment was almost done until I realized the data was bad. Then me and my boss proceeded to introduce a ground loop after trying to figure out what happened which also affected the measurments until he fixed that three hours later. A mad dash resulted in me and someone else doing about 60 hrs worth of measurements in six days (Wow that is really quite cool). As I'm typing samples are being measured on this lovely Sunday afternoon.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

an interesting idea, but it raises a lot of questions:

if its so foggy the bus driver cannot see people standing at the bus stops, should the bus be running at all? or is the driver going too fast for the conditions?

how does the bus turn the light off when it picks up the rider?

How often do kids walking by hit the button, just to be annoying, like they do with elevator buttons or street crossing buttons, and then walk away?

what if there are several lines running past one stop? how does the rider signal which bus (route) he wants? do all the busses have to stop until the right one comes along?

couldnt riders along foggy routes get a 1$ AAA flashlite to flag the bus down? Wouldnt it be cheaper for the bus company to give away $1 flash lites to regular riders than to put $2000 solar powered signals at every bus stop?

Maybe the bus driver DID see him but didnt want to pick up some homeless guy who looked like a bum?

If its so foggy all the time how does a solar powered device get enough energy to operate? wouldnt it be better to use deep storage batteries, like the Coast Guard uses on bouys?

Ok, Im done playing system engineer - its a clever idea, for some areas, under some conditions - and Im glad to see this guy pulled himself up out of a bad situation by thinking of a way to solve a unique problem :^)

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

. . . . . . Well if people have the drive and the determination they can accomplish anything they put their mind to. Even if it is cleaning the toilets or helping out your FIRST robotics team. That drive and determination that janitor has is something that every person should have after coming out of the FIRST program no matter what. If you come out with that determination you will succeed at whatever you put you mind to. I believe that I have gotten that determination through my time on my team. The number of hours of putting that robot together, working on the website, or promoting your team gets you closer to your future after high school. But don't get me wrong we still need to focus on our grades as well. So just think about that.

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

Then I wouldn't get any drinks containing ice from your local fast-food joint either, if I were you.

Toilets and Icemaker study

People, and even whole societies, are ruled by their perceptions (true or not) of the world around them and very few have the guts to challenge their own view of the world.

"People will either say the same old rhetoric or say the truth, and it will sound like it comes from Neptune" (probably slightly misquoted).

Re: This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor
 

Im not sure I would take the results of a 7th grade science fair project as irrefutable evidence

but even taken at face value:

I read that to say she found more bacteria in the ice, not that she found no bacteria in the toilets

and not that she found the same bacteria in the ice

besides, bacteria isn't the only thing you need to worry about. :ahh:

(this is how urban myths get started: "I read somewhere that someone did a study on toilets...")