This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor

[Ken Leung]

This is a story of a hotel bathroom janitor.

The main character of this story is a female university student who worked part time at the Tokyo Empire Hotel during her summer vacation. Her job was to clean bathrooms in this five stars hotel. The story goes something like this:

On her first day, when she first stepped into the bathroom she was assigned to, this university student almost threw up when she put her hand into the toilet for the first time. She tried her best to put up with her work, but after struggling for a few days, she knew she couldn’t handle it. She decided to quit her job.

As fate has it, the moment before she quit her job, this university student accidentally saw an old janitor, working in the same hotel doing the same job, grabbed a tea cup from his cart and proceeded to have a drink of water, not from the drinking fountain, but from the toilet he just cleaned a moment ago!

The university student was completely shocked when she saw that. But, when she confronted him about it, the old janitor proudly announce that every toilet he cleaned is so well-sanitized that you can drink from every one of them!

This incident greatly inspired the university student. It made her understand the true meaning of the professionalism spirit, and that is, no matter what kind of job you are have, or how bad that job can be, there are always higher standards, higher ideals, and higher purpose you can pursuit with it. It also made her realized that the meaning and value of the work do not depend on how noble or how cheap the work is, but whether or not you are able to look at it positively and discover satisfaction and determination from within it.

So, from then on, the university student stopped hating her job when she stepped back into the bathrooms. And from then on, that university student saw her job as grounds for training and self-improvement, instead of just another summer job. And from then on, every time after she cleaned the toilet, she asked herself this question, “Can I drink a cup of water from this toilet?”

When the vacation was finally over, so was the university student’s employment at the five stars hotel. On her last day, the manager of the hotel came by to check her work, and instead of finding another employee eager to leave this job behind for something better, the manager found the university student standing in front of everybody, grabbed a cup from her cart, and proceeded to have a drink of water from the toilet she just cleaned.

Every person at the scene was absolutely shocked by her action! The manager was especially impressed by this student, and decided a person like this must be hired by the hotel at all cost!

After graduation, the university student was easily hired by the Tokyo Empire Hotel to become part of their staff. With an unparalleled spirit of professionalism, she became the most outstanding raising star of the Tokyo Empire Hotel before reaching 37 years old. And with an unequaled amount of determination and spirit, she stepped into the political world of Japan and joined the cabinet with the strongest recommendation from Japanese prime minister Koizumi.

This university student’s name is Seiko Noda, the minister of Post and Telecommunications of the cabinet of the Japanese government.

Ever since her experience as a student, this forty-four years old woman, this public servant who is known through out Japan as candidate with the most potential to become the prime minister in the future, is always heard saying the following introduction every time she meet a stranger: “I am a professional bathroom janitor, and I am a humble servant of the Japanese cabinet.”

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.”