The Janitors' Closet

The PDA is in the chips

Interesting article on NPR, involving an electrician who was fired for hiding his whereabouts from management (he was on the golf course) by stashing his company provided, GPS enabled PDA in a foil lined bag of chips.  The PDA was to periodically report his location, so management could keep track of him.  The foil served as a Faraday cage - the foil blocks electromagnetic fields, hence blocked the GPS transmission.  (A metal trash can, lined with cardboard to keep the electronics from touching the metal can, works as well.  And it's bigger than a bag of chips.)

We keep a spare computer, and a hard drive containing bookkeeping and operations data, in a Faraday cage, to insure our functionality in event of a big power surge or, say, a nearby lightning strike.  So I'm all for the technology; keeping in operation day to day equates to survival in commercial janitorial.

It does bring into question those folks who track route employee locations based on, say, the GPS function of a cell phone.  Better, perhaps, to keep the GPS system in the vans.

Death by cleaning

Caught a news item regarding a grandmother who died cleaning up the bathroom where her son had overdosed on a synthetic opioid.  The son was found passed out and was rushed to the emergency room; mother went back home and decided to tidy up the scene - without donning protective gear.  She apparently (coroners toxicology reports are not in yet) inhaled or absorbed enough of the opioid to cause serious breathing problems; she was rushed to the hospital and died there a day before her son finally passed.

One could think long and hard on the current drug epidemic in America; combined with suicide, we are now experiencing a decline in average lifespan - something that has not happened here before, save during the Civil War, for obvious reasons.

Given my profession - I provide commercial janitorial service to a wide variety of facilities in the Phoenix area, healthcare, office and industrial - another point that occurred to me in reading the article is the necessity of using protective gear in doing any cleaning.  It's not just the chemicals that you don't want to inhale or splash into your eyes, it's the pathogens, chemicals and other substances that you're trying to remove from the office, lunchroom or restroom.  You really want to remove all that stuff by, say, flushing it down the drain, not by imbibing.

We use latex gloves, safety glasses and surgical face masks as a matter of course.  They are all cheap, easy to use, and on balance keeps our crew just a bit healthier than the average.  (We don't do disaster clean-up, but have full bunny suits available, just in case.) I see a lot of my competitors janitorial closets, as well as closets utilized by firms who do the cleaning in-house.  I pretty much never see any kind of protective gear at all. 

Somebody out there is not thinking.  Or doesn't care.

Flu season has hit early

In metro Phoenix, Arizona, where I make a modest living providing commercial janitorial service, flu season seems to have hit a bit early.  I got my flu shot well in advance this year (I usually wait, being scared of needles) and I use a long lasting hand sanitizing lotion (claims up to 4 hours as a germ barrier) whenever I'm in contact with many people - visiting a client, working a Chamber mixer, or Sunday church (of late, I'm at the neighborhood Salvation Army Citadel - they let me play bass trombone and euphonium in their brass band - and a whole lot of hand shaking goes on).

But, from a larger than individual perspective, here's some great advice from Steve Carroll at Cleaning and Maintenance Management, about what we figure we can do around the office, and what you should make sure that your janitorial service is doing, during flu season and ongoing:

1) Introduce hand sanitizers, and insure that folks are using them.  A box of sanitizing wipes on the front desk or sales counter might be an idea as well.

2) Go to hands free restrooms - fixtures, soap and paper

3) Have the sick employee stay home (infect the family, not us...)

4) Insure that the janitorial service understands and fulfills it's responsibilities - in both restroom and touch point sanitation

....and more - check out the article.  When we have a sick employee (figuring that someone who called in today was likely infectious yesterday), after thoroughly cleaning and sanitizing (we use hydrogen Peroxide - effective at both) any touch points he might have encountered, we disinfect  with a hospital grade quat product, and let it air dry to get a reasonable dwell time.  Fast and simple, and helps keep everyone else healthy, and working.  And we do the same for our clients.

Finally, as I drink my morning coffee, don't fail to disinfect the handle on the coffee pot.

 

 

Why things go wrong

Repeatedly over the years, I've interviewed supervisory folks sporting long experience in commercial janitorial service.  Most often, they cite multiple jobs, usually titled "operations manager" (general or regional), some for smaller owner-operators, most from the various cleaning franchises.

In virtually all cases, they report "operations" involves both day (interacting with customers) and night (training, supervising, filling-in) work, ongoing.  They also cite long shifts, multiple responsibilities, and much pressure and friction from higher up.

On founding my business, I had the privilege of working both day and night.  Didn't like it, so as soon as I could, I put a supervisor on to run the night operations.  I called him our "operations manager".  Didn't expect him to work days - at all.  As best I can recall, in the close to 40 years since I stopped working both days and nights myself, I've never asked anyone to do so.  I found that doing so causes irritability (in turn causing friction with others), hurts concentration and decision making, leads to (usually "dumb") mistakes, and impacts health.  Sounds like what my competition features in their business models.

Caught a review in the Journal several weeks ago of "Why We Sleep", by Matthew Walker.  He discusses the effects of sleep deprivation, such as irritability, concentration and decision making, and mistakes.  Curiously similar to what I notice working both days and nights.  Not a good way to run a business.

At more of a societal level, Walker delves into research on mistakes attributable to sleep deprivation in such fields as health care (think residents working 30 hours.  Not 30 hours per week, but a straight 30 hour shift.  And no more than two of those per week, interspaced by a couple of 12 hour shifts.)  Also, he mentions the indications of sleep deprivation leading to the Chernobyl melt-down, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill. 

By Chance, I recently read "Sea of Thunder", Evan Thomas's narrative of WWII in the Pacific.  The book focuses on the battle off Samar, during the Leyte landings.  We see lots of mistakes - in communication, judgment, intelligence analysis, friction causing lack of communication among folks who needed to communicate: most notably among Halsey and his staff, also at Pearl and in the forces covering the landings, and also among the Japanese. Illness, and exhaustion stemming from over-work and little sleep, affected all of those folks.  And lots of servicemen died.

Didn't get quite enough shut-eye last night.  I'm posting this and then going home to bed.

Smart homes - and offices?

Our office neighborhood lost power for about an hour this morning; when it came back on, and we'd restored internet connections and so on, about the first thing that came up was an article on enhancing one's security on one's various interconnected electronic devices around the home.  Good advice on avoiding WY-fi, updating devices often, generating one's own passwords, and so on.

I've not seen much evidence of such interconnectivity in the sort of client we serve - smaller commercial janitorial jobs in the metro Phoenix area.  But, reading the trade press, I'm sure it's coming.

Going back to our short power outage: Whenever this happens, I'm reminded anew of how much I depend on the electronic gizmo at which I currently sit.  There's very little I can accomplish around the office without it, except perhaps re-painting.  The over-riding problem with interconnectivity, as I see it, is that when one aspect malfunctions - through a glitch, a hacker (North Korea or the kid next door), or an electrical issue - everything is likely to go down.  In an office building, if you tie together door access, alarm system, security cameras, the web and so on, you add convenience and ability to your system, but also complexity. 

Folks who study disasters and accidents distinguish between complicated systems (those that have a lot of moving parts) and complex systems (those that have moving parts that interconnect in ways the results of which are often difficult to predict). For a complicated system, think pre-flighting an airliner. You have a whole long check list, but should you miss something - say setting the brakes - you know pretty precisely what will happen.  Should you miss several things, again, you know what will happen.  The couple of nuclear power plant disasters over the years illustrate the issue with a complex system: A couple or three small things change or go wrong, and you've no idea what might happen.  Kind of like the weather (the butterfly flapping it's wings...).

One might go a step further.  My (currently) favorite archaeologist argues that building a society is simply a matter of adding complexity (Tainter - "The Collapse of Complex Societies").  You have an issue - say a famine in a Roman province - you add infrastructure (physical or bureaucratic) to fix it - say a system to ship food into the province.  He argues that complexity adds overhead, so the society grows less and less productive, thus saves less resources ongoing, and eventually has no resilience to the next outrage, whether it's a plague or a crop failure or the barbarians at the gates.  Thus in Tainter's magisterial survey, societies fail for a variety of proximate causes, but most always for underlying economic weakness.  I'd add to the economic analysis the complexity caused unpredictably of outcomes.  And, we're certainly creating an ever more complex society.

In other words, "Keep it Simple, Stupid".

Tattoos in the Workplace

Just opened an email from one of those generic "how to improve your business" sites.  Several topics were
featured, starting with "logo design" and concluding with "Tattoos in the workplace".  It occurred to me, immediately, that I'd be money ahead by combining the two.  After all, what firm would object to it's own logo tattooed onto an employee?  Further, one could save a buck by doing away with the uniform T-shirt in favor of a large tattoo on the torso; it would be quite appropriate in Phoenix summers (our folks have to do janitorial in summer, regardless of 120 plus degrees, in addition to the reasonable parts of the year).

Given the temperature, I could promote it as an employee benefit.  Further, it might help retention.  Who is likely to leave a job after the tattoo?  (Tattooing one's current girlfriend's name on your bicep comes to mind, as an analogy.)

On the other hand, I might have some rebellion among the female members of our team.....

So give everybody the same alarm code, but change it weekly...

The alarm system in the new client's suite seemed a bit strange.  The doctor in charge is big on security, so he's asked his office manager change the alarm code weekly.  She (the office manager) doesn't have the time, so she changes it "when she thinks of it".  And then tells everybody.  They all have the same code, because changing all those codes would be even more time consuming.

I can envision the over-worked office manager changing the code, and then getting pulled onto another task, and forgetting to tell someone of the new code - probably us.  I really hate those 3:00 in the morning calls from a frustrated janitor.  And the client doubtless hates the false alarm charge from the city, due to the police dispatch.

What we do, and recommend to our janitorial clients, is issue each of our folks authorized to disarm the office alarm an individual code.  We emphasize to each that he is to NEVER let his code out; he is responsible for anything bad happening in the office while his code has the alarm disarmed.  When a person leaves our employ,  we delete his code, immediately.  We do not have to wait for the alarm company to act; we do it in-house.  And the alarm company need not know anyone's code; all they show on their records, and on the security print-out, is the user code (so anyone reviewing the security record knows who disarmed the alarm, and who armed it, but not his code.  Most all alarm companies are set up similarly, as is the alarm company of the client mentioned above.

In passing, it's probably not a good idea to use the building's street address, or the current year, as an alarm code.  Burglars might be mean and anti-social, but they're not necessarily stupid.

I hardly claim to be qualified as a security consultant (I have a consultant for that), but I can handle simple common sense.