These
two strips are from that “Truth is funnier than fiction” department.
In early 1985, the university re-negotiated its janitorial contract with
a new service provider. One of the universal constants of every bureaucracy,
however, is that they never equate the “lowest bidder” to the “worst service”,
and, in 1985, ERAU was no different. Thus the lowest bidder was selected
to take over all of the janitorial services for the entire Daytona Beach
campus, and the previous service provider was released. Immediately after
this contract was implemented, however, some strange stuff began to happen
on campus. Waste baskets routinely over-flowed, and rest-rooms were always
a mess, something was indeed amiss.
Students who work on campus newspapers
have this habit of hanging around campus late at night and long after
the normal students have gone home. This is mainly because the newspaper
staff members have no social life to speak of and thus find the needs
of the paper a good excuse for never leaving the campus. Cartoonists
are even worse because the truly do not have a life and thus tend to
live in the newspaper office. Late one night while hanging around in
the Avion office, because I had no life, I wandered down to the rest
room and noticed a man who resembled a local vagrant, lounged out on
the chairs outside of the barber shop, sound asleep. Returning to the
newspaper office I mentioned this discovery to the other staff members
who were in the office... who also had no life. Subsequently, everyone
had the chance to go down and see sleeping beauty. Campus security was
called and later informed us that the man was one of the new janitors.
The following day the staff contacted
the powers that be and raised the question as to why their staff were
sleeping on the job. The newspaper was informed in the most forceful
terms that there was no one from the janitorial service sleeping on
the job. In fact, the new contractor was said to only employ only the
best of janitorial professionals. They simply needed time to “get their
act together”.
Why is it that contractors that
suck always need the rest of the world to wait for them to get their
act together? Is this so that they can REALLY suck later on? Apparently,
that was the case for the new janitorial service at good old ERAU, because
just a few days after we newspaper staff members with no lives had discovered
the sleeping janitor, one of the other janitors was discovered in the
engineering building with his arm hopelessly stuck in a vending machine.
Apparently he had been reaching up through the door to rob some snacks
when his arm became stuck. He was forced to sit there until the morning
staff arrived, or he “got his act together”... whichever came first.
So stuck was this poor slob that the paramedics from the Daytona Beach
Fire Department had to be called in to free him. Shortly there after,
the new janitorial service and their “professional” staff were also
freed from their new contract with our university.
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