AUSTIN, Texas (Mar 22 2001) -- Student raises awareness of UT custodial cleaning procedure by using a toilet
By Jeffrey Norton
Daily Texan Staff
Mark Bullard bets you can't clean his toilet bowl in less than one minute.
Bullard, a Plan II senior, set up a display on West Mall Wednesday that mirrors a typical UT bathroom, consisting of a dirty toilet, urinal, sink and floor. The exhibit was created to show students the pressure placed on UT custodians to clean the campus under the team-cleaning system, a system custodians say leaves them overworked.
He challenged students to clean the sink or urinal in 30 seconds, the toilet in one minute and the floor in three minutes time spans he feels are an accurate recreation of the constraints custodians are placed under with team cleaning.
Unlike the former zone-cleaning system, where custodians were given an area of a building to clean during their shift, custodians now work under the team-cleaning system, where they are given a specific job to do for an entire building, such as cleaning bathrooms or vacuuming floors.
"The quality of the cleaning suffers because the custodians are overworked," Bullard said.
But Ernest Hunter, assistant director of the UT Physical Plant, disagrees.
"I just have no idea where this student got his times from, " Hunter said. "We use industry standard times, but there's no rigid set times."
Bullard said the times he allotted for the cleaning of each object resulted from watching the custodians work while preparing a documentary on them.
But Hunter said even if a student is unable to finish in the allotted time, it is insulting to believe that a custodian couldn't.
"For someone to believe that a professional person can't do this because a normal person can't, to me, degenerates the profession they're talking about," Hunter said.
Hunter said Bullard's antipathy toward the team-cleaning system is a result of not fully grasping the process.
"I think it's an unfortunate misunderstanding of the process team cleaning is not the problem," Hunter said.
Bullard, who admitted not many students participated in his challenge, said the low number was evidence that his message was on-target.
"The fact that not many people want to clean it proves the point," Bullard said. "How would you like to clean that for eight hours?"
© 2001 The Daily Texan