Health and welfare of college students drives this Pitt janitorial worker
Pittsburgh in focus
Office cleaners: Work with dignity
This is the last in a six-part series on office cleaners.
For Jeffrey Waddell, cleaning buildings at the University of Pittsburgh means keeping people healthy. “There are 77,000 germs in the bathroom that we combat every day, and that alone is a very daunting task,” Mr. Waddell, 61, of Penn Hills, said. “At Pitt, because we have an influx of so many students from Japan, Spain, from across the world coming here, we’re constantly trying to keep up with enough germ warfare to kill the germs, to make a difference.
“Why? Because colds, respiratory situations, even infectious diseases have come across the borders.”
And when someone is ill, Mr. Waddell and his colleagues are one of the lines of defense.
“Short-term, long-term effects on our bodies — we have to go in there [dorm rooms]. If a person says their roommate has a really bad cold, can you come and disinfect? We have to go in there.
“This young lady came through as a freshman. I had to clean the dorms down at the towers and we interacted a little bit. So the summer came and she moved up, from a freshman to a sophomore. She’s moving back in. We reconnected. We talked for a few minutes. And she says, ‘Mom, this is Jeff.’
“When she said that the mom looked at me — I got kind of nervous at first. I said, Hi, how are you doing?’”
The woman replied: “Oh, you’re Jeff? Thank you for making this a home for my daughter.”
That proved a point to Mr. Waddell: He and his co-workers make a difference in people’s lives.
“And that showed me what we do, even though sometimes our employers don’t realize it ... we do make a difference. To think she would take it all the way home — she lived out of state — and talk about me, not a professor, not her dorm partner, but to include me in her conversation about her college experience.
“People fail to realize, an ‘atta boy’ goes a long way. It’s just appreciation.”