Winter break?
For some, it’s time for hard work that can’t be done during academic year

Ken Kane, custodian, cleans the men’s swimming team locker room in the Field House. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

Right after final exams, many faculty members and students leave for the winter holiday break. Some P&S and merit employees supplement the three official University holidays with vacation time and head out of town.

But for some University employees, the holidays are a blessed chance to catch up without the busyness that characterizes their offices the rest of the time. It’s a chance to do preventive maintenance, to strip floors and rewax them with less chance of a student’s muddy boots ruining the work, to replace an electrical breaker box without messing up someone’s computer. It’s a time to think ahead and develop new ideas.

fyi chose to interview a sampling of the many employees hard at work during the break.

Preparing students’ homes

John Josten, assistant director of facilities and operations for Residence Services, says his employees have more major tasks to do when students aren’t in residence than they do when they return.

“The custodial workers do the floor work, cleaning carpets, stripping off wax and cleaning the hard-surface floors in lobby entrances of the residence halls, and preparing rooms for students who will be moving in during the break,” Josten says.

Utility work that may result in short-term power outages, such as the recent installation of a new 1,600-amp breaker in Burge, is saved for the holidays so that it will affect fewer students and computers, he notes.

Al Hulse, facilities mechanic, repairs a dishwasher in Burge Hall. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

“We’ve done preventive maintenance on the heating system in Hillcrest,” he says. “Hillcrest and Mayflower are the two residence halls that allow students to stay over breaks, so there’s no time that we can work there when it doesn’t affect students. Among others, athletes were in Hillcrest during break, including football players before the Orange Bowl.”

In the residence dining halls, large rotary ovens are fine-tuned for the spring semester meals to come and the dishwashers get a close look, he adds.

The intensive work schedule during the break was not unusual, Josten says.

“We have two pages, single-spaced, of activities we completed during Thanksgiving break,” Josten says. “Each semester break has at least one page of activities for each building and each dining hall. There isn’t a time when we’re not busy.”

Keeping ‘em on the road

You may know the Motor Vehicle Rental Service as the motor pool, the place to go to pick up a University vehicle for a trip. But behind the front counter is a maintenance area and beyond that, a car wash added just two months ago. Both are consistently busy.

The 11 full-time employees and four student employees maintain the 530 vehicles the office owns and some of the 100 vehicles that are owned by other departments, says Mike Wilson, supervisor. The fleet includes cars, vans, buses, and trucks.

Denny Detweiler services a Facilities Service Group car at Motor Vehicle Rental Service. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

Remember those athletes in Hillcrest? When it came time to go to the airport for the flight to Miami, the bus was dispatched from the pool.

“I tried to see if someone wanted us to take the bus to Miami for the Orange Bowl,” Wilson adds. “But no one wanted to go that way.”

While Wilson speaks, Denny Detweiler services a red truck with the familiar Facilities Service Group decal on its side. His brother, Michael, is a mechanic at Cambus, Wilson notes. Jerry Brumley, working nearby on a gray sedan, puts in a new battery. The swish-swish of the car wash can be heard in a separate room just beyond a giant garbage truck, so large that its cab barely fits under the old wooden trusses of the maintenance garage.

Fixing the mail machines

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” the motto says. It’s not, despite everyone’s belief, an official motto of the U.S. Postal Service. But it does describe Central Mail Service, especially since it recently added to its responsibilities the mail delivery for the University of Northern Iowa.

Chris Kula, Central Mail business manager, says he tries to let as many employees as possible take time off during the winter break. But mail peaks just before the holiday, so that’s difficult.

Joel Yedlick, foreground, and Dan Coburn prepare mailing envelopes at Central Mail Service. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

That’s especially true when a 74,000-piece mailing comes in in mid-December. Mail clerks Dan Coburn, a two-year employee of Central Mail Service, and Joel Yedlik, who transferred from the UI Hospitals and Clinics almost two months ago, put the envelopes through a machine that does videojetting—spraying addresses directly onto the envelope. The machine speeds along, addressing a little over 14,000 envelopes an hour.

Coburn and Yedlik processed 66,000 envelopes in one day before other machines folded and inserted the letters.

In the last week of December, the office has a few days of downtime, Kula says.

“It’s kind of nice—we play catch-up, get our paperwork done, work on new forms, clean our machinery. We really need it, because January is just Katie-bar-the-door busy with W-2 forms and paychecks for both universities.”

Attacking grout and floors

Debraha Martin is facilities services coordinator for the sports facilities on campus. The 25 custodial employees in her area maintain Carver-Hawkeye Arena, the Athletics Hall of Fame, the Field House, Kinnick Stadium, and practice facilities. They use break time to accomplish work that simply can’t be done until people are away—refinishing wood floors, for example, which means a 10-day total shutdown of the area involved.

“We work it out with the occupants. Football, for example, was away at the Orange Bowl so that would have been ideal, but there aren’t any wooden floors in that area. We started the Field House’s wooden floors Jan. 6,” Martin says.

While all locker rooms in sports areas are cleaned and disinfected regularly, Martin says, it takes a break time to clean the pesky grout on the tile walls. That has been one of the group’s winter break tasks.

Winter break? So what?

While some welcome a break as a time to get things done, for other employees it’s just another day at the office.

That was true, for three weeks of the break, for some professors and students.

Winter Session classes compress a semester’s worth of instruction into three weeks of intensive, all-day sessions. This year, 29 courses were available.

It’s also true of those who cut our checks, purchase our equipment, print our documents, tend to our grounds. Work isn’t governed by season, it’s always there.

As Mike Wilson of Motor Vehicle Rental Service sums it up, “The garbage trucks still have to run, no matter what.”

Article by Anne Tanner