Jeffrey Braaton tries to keep the snow off of the sidewalk outside Knight Hall Wednesday
The zombie apocalypse hits and who mows the lawns? The little guys.
OK, so maybe the lawns get forgotten if you are anywhere but the set of the Walking Dead when the zombie apocalypse hits, but the point still applies. The grass is trimmed. The trash doesn’t smell. The flowers are beautiful. Prexy’s Pasture is clean. The sidewalks are even. The snow is removed. This is just a short list of the things that many students at UW take for granted.
The next time you walk to campus and breathe a sigh of relief as you step onto the sidewalk that you can actually see, thank the little guys, or in this case, the campus maintenance guys. That would be this morning for anyone who is confused.
Walking to class can be treacherous, though many students do it. From neighbors that don’t know what a snow shovel looks like, to those that you swear just have a thing for ice (or rather, watching their fellow humans try to navigate an iceberg and fail epically), they can be hazardous to your physical health in ways that the many sidewalks on campus never are.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been beaten by those patches of ice thanks to low-maintenance neighbors more times than I care to admit. But on campus, we tread safely. Don’t just take the clean and safe sidewalks as something that always-has-been-always-will-be, because if the campus maintenance people decided to go on strike, we would all have some serious ice injuries. These people who keep us safe while on campus don’t get the appreciation they deserve, and frankly I’m disappointed that they don’t. We all know that they are there, even if we don’t really think about it much.
I encourage everyone to take a minute to thank someone who works with campus maintenance. Thank them for your rear end, your hands, your poorly soled shoes that work because they do, and your self-esteem that stays intact because you don’t spill yourself in front of everyone on campus.
On days when the snow dumps before classes are anywhere near over, similar to yesterday, don’t take lightly the fact that you don’t have to tread lightly. As soon as that snow starts to fall and we run to be inside and out of the danger of the slippery and cold world we choose to inhabit, campus maintenance is on the sidewalks keeping it clean and safe for all of us.
