Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and most people will say thanks for family and friends. Which is good — everyone needs to stop and think about the people who help get them through each day.
But what about the people who work relatively unseen and get little or no recognition?
There are people who work for the University who are almost never recognized for their good work. Janitors, Starbucks employees and generally any person who works in administration get almost no positive feedback — yet most of them do their jobs to the fullest and never seek feedback from anyone.
In fact, most of these people get told continually they aren’t performing well. When there’s a problem, these people are the first to be blamed; when they fix it, no one notices because the problem suddenly vanished.
Yes, these people are paid to do a job; however, they aren’t paid to do a good job, or to care about working hard. But they do, of course, and they do it every day. Imagine if the janitors decided to just do half the work necessary to clean the bathrooms or to sanitize the kitchen; people would certainly notice them then. And it wouldn’t take very long for people to get completely annoyed with a Starbucks line that moves at one-third normal speed.
Anyone who works on-campus — whether it’s a student at Starbucks or a security guard standing outside of Calhoun Lofts — deserves a thank-you. It’s that simple, yet most people (including the ones working in the Daily Cougar office) often forget to do it.
Well, now’s the chance. There are two days left in this short week to thank every person on campus. The clerks working the cash registers in the UC-Satellite, the maintenance people fixing everything from air conditioners to sewage pumps and the janitors cleaning up someone’s Taco Bell mess — all of them deserve to be thanked.
We shouldn’t lose our common decency, and we hope you’ll join us in giving thanks for the little things. That’s what the Daily Cougar staff is really the most thankful for.
