I folded my arms and let the supervisor give his presentation about savings and part-timers.
When the floor opened, a man in a suit stood up before I could. Nobody in the room knew him. He said he had graduated fourteen years ago, and that for two of those years, home wasn’t a place he could go at night. He said there was a janitor who never once made him feel like a problem — who left the gym unlocked, kept a cot in the back, and made sure there was something to eat in the morning. He said he was an attorney now, and he had driven three hours because he’d heard they were about to call that man invisible.
Then he sat down, and someone else stood up. Then a teacher. Then a parent whose kid I had talked down off the roof one bad night. One after another, in a room the supervisor had counted on being empty.
He said nobody notices the janitor. The only person who never noticed the janitor was him.
The facilities director had numbers, too. The company’s bid didn’t cover any of what I actually did — the boiler I nursed through fifteen winters, the pipes I caught before they burst, the small fixes that never became a work order because I’d already handled them. Outsource that, he said, and the deferred repairs alone would cost more in a year than my salary did in five.
The board voted the outsourcing down.
They didn’t take my keys. They handed them back, with a raise, and a title that finally put “head of facilities” on the man who had been doing the job for twenty-nine years.
I still unlock that school before dawn. The gym is still open after hours for whoever needs it. Turns out invisible just means nobody was looking at the right person.