From sweeping the carpeted hallways, to cleaning the bathrooms, to hanging ready-to-use trash bags over each student's door knob, the housekeeping staff cleans up after the messes left behind by residents daily.
These housekeepers, who work daily in first-year students' living quarters, encounter the same students day after day in their robes, running to class or brushing their teeth.
And the relationship gets personal. Second-year College student Stephanie Garback said she remembers well her stay - and a special housekeeper - as a first year in Bonnycastle House.
Leaving for her MATH 132 class a little before 9 a.m., Garback ran into one of the Bonnycastle housekeepers one Monday. He was sweeping the staircase when Garback came across him.
Trying not to scatter his swept-up tidy piles of trash and dirt, Garback dodged around the steps of the staircase and said good morning. He responded with a friendly hello.
Such was the scenario for Garback and the Bonnycastle housekeeper all year - the dodging, the hello and a brief conversation - each Monday, Wednesday and Friday early in the morning.
Now a second year, Garback still runs into him. The two have not lost any of their prior acquaintance, except the fact that their meetings no longer take place in the Bonnycastle hallway with Garback in her pajamas.
"He remembered us," Garback said, recalling the meeting she and her former Bonnycastle hallmates had with their former housekeeper while walking through the McCormick Road dormitories.
Garback's story shows how a simple greeting or smile can last in a person's memory - in this case for both parties.
Fourth-year College student Tomma Winder recalled a similar experience with the housekeeper in her Gooch-Dillard suite her second year.
The housekeeper who cleaned her suite would always say hello and Winder said he was more than eager to carry on conversations with residents while he labored over the dirtied bathroom.
This Gooch-Dillard housekeeper often talked with residents about his work-related problems and how his position on housekeeping was in fact his second job. When the nine girls in the suite heard that their housekeeper was struggling with finances around the holidays, they all pooled together some money and left it in a Christmas card for him.
"He was always nice and said hello to us while he was cleaning," Winder said. "We just wanted to help him out."
Although Winder admits that it is often easy for students to think of the housekeeping staff as workers who "just come in and clean the bathroom and stop" after they have finished their job, she said she now knows firsthand how meaningful it is to get to know a housekeeper beyond the typical relationship.
While Garback and Winder have a handful of pleasant memories of the housekeeping staff, there are those students who remember more than the warm sentiments.
Second-year College student J.R. Powers-Luhn said he knows the impressive work-ethic housekeeping members invest in their jobs.
As a first year in Cauthen House, Powers-Luhn saw that trash amounted in different places throughout the dorm. While dispensing waste into a trash can may be considered a commendable feat for some first years, one particular Cauthen housekeeper held his residents to a higher standard.
It all started a month into the school year when the first note from the housekeeper appeared on the hall Resident Advisor's door: "No personal trash in the trash cans."
Students who lived in a dormitory first year should know that one of the cardinal rules is to never place any personal trash in the bathroom trash can. And even though it is more than likely that people break that rule and get away with it, Powers-Luhn and his hallmates, however, met their match in their Cauthen housekeeper.
When the students continued to disobey their housekeeper's requests, two R.A.'s on the hall were surprised to find nice piles of trash in front of their doors.
The housekeeper, "being the man of action that he is, had decided on a clever and unique punitive measure," Powers-Luhn said.
Maybe by habit or perhaps in hope of provoking another interesting reaction from their housekeeper, the residents of second floor Cauthen continued to throw personal trash in the bathroom waste can. The game was on.
Now the housekeeper went to the next level, taping garbage with duct tape to the R.A.s' doors.
What was initially amusement, Powers-Luhn said, eventually "faded to disgust as the trend continued despite the residents' clever counterstroke of taping this same garbage to the utility closet."
This trash that was taped to the R.A.s' doors was not your average, random garbage either. Instead, this Cauthen housekeeper had gone way beyond the call of duty, picking out napkins and candy wrappers - the personal trash - from the bathroom waste bins. Nor did the Cauthen housekeeper waiver in his practices. Day after day he artfully displayed these personal items on the doors for all to see.
Powers-Luhn said he often asked himself, "At what point would it have been much, much easier to simply tie the bag and take out the trash?" He said he realizes now that his hall undoubtedly owes the housekeeper credit for driving home the point to him and his stubborn first-year residents.
Whether residents continue to throw personal trash in the bathroom dispenser or not, the housekeeping staff will be back tomorrow faithfully cleaning up after hundreds of students who no longer have parents nagging them. A simple hello wouldn't hurt.
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