Keeping a school clean takes a lot of work, but a janitor who is good at his job will come up with systems that let him get it done without causing any problems.

What would you do if one of the lunch ladies complained to your boss about how you did your job, so your boss made you change up your whole routine?

That is what happened to the janitor in this story, so he followed the new processes, which left the entire cafeteria messy, infuriating the lunch ladies.

Complain about how I do my job? Cool, let’s see how things go when I do it your way

I work as a school janitor. Half my day is spent in the lunch room emptying the trash cans and sweeping up.

I would imagine this would get very frustrating.

At most schools, you get 15+ minutes in between each lunch period to do all the cleaning. At my school, I get less than a full minute, if I’m lucky.

Normally, if a trash can isn’t full, I just dump one can into another, and then tie off THAT bag when it gets full. It’s a lot faster than having to replace every bag every time, AND it saves a ton of bags.

It sounds like he does a great job here.

I also sweep up around the tables, and, if I see a big mess under a table, I ask the kids to move their feet and sweep that up too.

I do it this way because it’s the only way to keep up and keep things clean. If I pulled every bag every time instead of dumping one can into another, not only would I run out of bags halfway through the week, but it would also take way longer.

Obviously, he knows how to do his job.

If I only swept under tables when there was no kids sitting there, I would literally never have an opportunity to sweep under tables.

Enter the lunch ladies. Most of them are nice but there’s this one older one who is just a miserable human being.

Talk about a stereotype.

She yells at everyone including the kids, and is just always angry about something.

Earlier this week, she yelled at me for dumping one trash can into another instead of pulling the bag. Why she chose today to do this, I don’t know, since I’d been doing this every day for the past 3+ years.

How is it any of her business?

I know how to do my job and didn’t ask her opinion, so I just ignored her, didn’t say anything, and kept doing what I was doing.

Fast forward an hour or two, and I’m getting a call from my district boss that there was a complaint. The lunch ladies are saying they don’t like that I dump cans instead of pulling bags, and they don’t like that I sweep under the kids feet.

The boss obviously has no idea how things work here.

My boss tells me just stick to cleaning in between lunch periods. I try to explain that that’s literally a period of less than a minute and isn’t even a fifth of the amount of time I’d need to do it that way, he says just do it anyway to keep the lunch ladies happy.

He’s a good dude, but he’s just trying to squash complaints and keep them from going further cause he doesn’t and deal with it.

Ok, its a dumb idea, but he is the boss.

He says from now on, I’m ONLY to empty trash or sweep the floors in between lunches, where there’s not students in the cafeteria, and also I’m to pull the bags every time. No more dumping cans.

Cue malicious compliance.

Just doing as he is told.

Starting then, I ONLY cleaned in between lunches when there was no kids. Of course, this is literally less than 60 seconds, so I only had time to get to half the trash cans.

And since I was replacing every bag instead of dumping cans, each can took longer. I didn’t even have time to sweep AT ALL.

You can’t really blame the kids for this.

The trash cans I couldn’t get to would fill up and overflow, and the kids don’t care and just keep piling trash on top. The floor got more and more covered in trash, since I didn’t have time to sweep at all.

I did this for the rest of the week.

She shouldn’t be upset, she got just what she wanted.

The same lunch lady tried to scream at me to go empty the trash when I was standing there on Tuesday, but I explained, “I was told by my boss that you guys didn’t like me sweeping or emptying trash around the kids, so now I’m only allowed to do that when the cafeteria is empty.

I’d love to go get that trash can, but there’s kids eating lunch right now so I’m not allowed.”

Sorry lady, bosses orders.

She tried to argue but I just told her I’m following direct and explicit orders from my boss. There was nothing she could do.

When the final lunch ended, I cleaned as much as I could before 2pm and then stopped, as that was my lunch time and the union REQUIRES that we take our lunches at our allotted times.

Once again, rules are rules.

It’s non-optional and zero tolerance for deviation. And after my lunch, I have to go clean classrooms since school is out, and classrooms take priority over the cafeteria.

End result? The cafeteria never got fully cleaned.

I guess the lunch lady shouldn’t have complained.

When the lunch ladies came in the next day and found it still half filthy, they went through the roof and complained to my boss.

He called me in and I explained that I was just follow orders, and the lunch ladies were the ones who asked I do things this way.

No surprise here.

Suffice it to say, I was told to go back to doing it however I thought was best.

You wanna stick your nose in my business and tell me how to do my job? See how that turns out.

Some people just love to complain, even when they don’t fully understand what it is they are complaining about.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this.

This was excellent advice.

Cafeterias can become a mess really fast.

He handled it like a pro.

Janitors are usually really great people.

This is so true.

Respect the janitor.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.