How supportive is your school janitor?

[Andy A.]

We've never really worked in a school for much time. Where we do work, we often are working along side janitorial staff or even 2nd/3rd shift workers. As far as I know, we've never had anything but good relations with everyone we share space with. To some degree, I've noticed that employees at our sponsors take a bit of pride in the team, and seem truly pleased with the students and their interest in engineering. The owners and managers of the buisnesses are also fantastic, as they understand what kind of stress we are under and forgive us when we are not the greatest guests.

Also, we've had the same bus driver drive us down to our first regional for years now. She's shown up in many team photos and seems to enjoy the trips almost as much as we do. Many thanks to her for getting us where we need to go safely.

So props to all the people that FIRST teams work with, around and on the shoulders of. We couldn't do it with out their help and support.

[greencactus3]

ours are great, sum love what we're doing, sum dont care, and sum have no clue. we just tell those we're makeing an adapter for the arm to hold a mop and they're happy. aftrer all, all those rubber marks down the hall is our fault..

[Lisa Rodriguez]

Our janitors are FANTASTIC, they're on a first name basis with most of the adult mentors on our team. The ones that don't clean the area we work on often come in to visit us and see how we're doing. We clean up after ourselves and check with them before we do thing we're not sure about.

This year one of the janitors helped us out A LOT by designing a ramp we built for a community service project. He's great, along with all the other ones.

We love our janitors

[JP_1163]

Rules to live by when dealing with support staff (custodial, secretarial, food service).

1. Fully inform them of your needs for space, cleaning aids (brooms, paper products, copies etc.) and time you will need to be in the area.
2. If you make a mess clean it up. Your custodian(s) already have more than enough to do without cleaning up after you!
3. Thank them profusely when they do something nice for you and bite your tongue if everything doesn't go well. Remember, everyone has their good and bad days. Maybe you just hit one of their bad days on your good day. Deal with it and move on.
4. The gracious in gracious professionalism should move into all areas of your conscious actions. Not just when you are in FIRST. Make it a point every day to be gracious in everything you do and with everyone you meet. In this way conflicts will be minor and soon forgiven or forgotten.
5. A happy support staff can make your efforts or break your efforts. Its much easier to deal with the former than have to lament the latter.

Cheers!