On my way into the building at work this afternoon I ran into one of the custodians who was mopping the floor outside the bathrooms. He asked how I was doing so I stopped to talk to him for a couple minutes.
There was a big fan blocking the door to one of the restrooms and he pointed out to me how he’d just waxed the floor in there and how shiny the floor was now and how people like using clean restrooms. You could see the pride on his face about how he’d worked hard to make that bathroom floor shine.
The furniture-moving guy (handiman essentially) was showing me once a few weeks ago how he’d (in thought of the people who would be using the conference room) rewired the lights so that the lights closest to and farthest from the projector screen were wired separate so that you could turn off only the lights near the screen but not all the lights in the room so that it would be easier to see the screen. The other day he was showing me how he was using the laser-level to get the wipe-off boards hung perfectly level across the whole wall.
But how often do we step back and think about the fact that someone took pride in making that restroom clean and inviting, or that someone else rewired the lights to make the conference room a more pleasant environment to work in? Nah, we so often sit there and focus on how our trash didn’t get emptied because there’s only one guy doing all the cleaning who “they” (management) wouldn’t “let” come back tomorrow (overtime) to empty the trashes.
Sometimes I find the “least of them” at work to be some of the most fascinating, because they just show you a perspective you don’t see from lofty people in the company. For the most part, its a very consistent attitude I’ve seen…they are here because its their job, so they try and do their job well–even though they probably won’t get any praise and glory for their job well done.
We could talk all morning about humility, but it is perhaps meaningless until you see it in practice. I have a lot of respect for those guys, they work hard, and they try real hard to just do what they do well even if what they do doesn’t sound all that impressive.