Custodian enjoying his new line of work

Mini dreadlocks and a semi-toothed grin never looked so friendly.

Dangling on the lobe of his left ear hangs a lusterless silver hoop. His scent: a potion of Clorox, Windex and a hint of acetone, on the side.

Carl Hubbard, Sr., tends to all the custodial needs in Maxwell Student Union. He sweeps, swipes and Swiffers the halls from 3 p.m. until 11:15 p.m. with seven months of experience and a grin that never leaves his face.

“I have a good time at this school,” Hubbard said. “I should have started working here years ago.”

His younger co-worker and self-proclaimed protégé, Joe Thomas, looks up to Hubbard with respectful, yet playful eyes.

“He’s a real cool guy,” Thomas said. “Down to earth and outgoing. He knows everyone in the building. He’s real respectful and outgoing. Everyone’s going to stop and speak to him. He’s real popular with the students.”

When Hubbard and his crew walk into work weekday afternoons, the first thing to check off the list is making sure no safety hazards are looming.

“We can’t have anybody getting hurt,” Hubbard said. “Like if there’s a spill or something. That’s what we got to get to first. You gotta get all that stuff out the way.”

Then Hubbard and his crew make their rounds, starting with the upstairs bathrooms outside the dinning hall and making their way downstairs to the post office and bookstore. The mopping, buffering and waxing the halls back to their cleanest of states.

“We clean the little (silver) boxes (in the women’s bathroom). I don’t know the name of it, but we get all the trash outta everything,” Hubbard said. “That’s only in the women’s bathroom. Their bathroom is better than ours, way better than ours. (They) get all them big mirrors and stuff, the men’s bathroom is just straight in.

“Toilets, mirrors, windows, mopping, trashcans – we clean it all,” Hubbard said. “If they mess up the floor real bad with heel marks, that can be a real problem there. If it’s real bad, you might have to put some wax down. The floors you have to pay close attention to. The windows are a whole different story there.”

After a couple hours of cleaning, Hubbard and his co-workers venture to Chick-fil-A for a much-anticipated break to join some of the neighboring buildings’ custodial crews.

With five children – one at Georgia State University living in Buckhead – it makes sense that Hubbard wins over many of the GCSU and Early College students .

“The Early College kids and those little bitty kids always want you to buy them something,” Hubbard said. “I tell them ‘I can’t buy you nothing now, you gotta go ask your teacher.’ If the teacher says it’s all right, then I’ll go buy them a soda or something like that. But they don’t forget though. Then I’m like ‘Oh boy, I started something.’ ”

Army recruiters called after Hubbard graduated from Baldwin County High School and with the service he traveled overseas as far as Germany. One spur of the moment relocation moved him to Alaska, which came with its benefits.

“I learned how to ski off the little ramp. Well, they called it a little ramp. That ain’t no little ramp,” Hubbard said. “I call the little ramp a big ramp and the big ramp a monster ramp.”

Before Hubbard moved back to Milledgeville to work as a custodian, he “did some fixin’ on trains” at the Race Car railroad company where he specialized in welding. He returned to GCSU to escape the hazardous conditions in that industry.

“It started getting a little dangerous, and a dude did get killed down there,” Hubbard said. “He got killed when I was in the process of coming up here. It was a little too dangerous for me. (Race Car) didn’t have it together the way it should have been.

Seven months of custodial duties hasn’t dampened Hubbard’s spirits in the slightest, but he hopes to travel in the near future.

“I wanna get outta here in a couple of years. I can last a little bit longer, probably. Then I’ll start taking those trips I want to take. I wanna go overseas somewhere like England or someplace like that.”

With Hubbard’s optimistic and friendly personality, it’s no surprise his favorite part of the job is the people he meets while he’s working.

“Meeting all the different people, now, that’s the point right there,” Hubbard said. “There be groups all over and we be talking to all of them. Coming up, you might not get a chance to talk to people in certain groups, you know. But here you get a chance to talk to them, and they’re cool. They might look different, but they be cool when you get to talkin’ to them. That’s what we’ve found out. We have a good time doing that.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Dec 4 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry