Kristen Bailey
Published: December 7, 2005
This is the face of a woman who knows the dirt on Pensacola Junior College, and not just the physical dirt.
Spending hours every day cleaning Building 4, custodian Angie White gets
PJC’s dirt- everything from which professors to take to the scoundrels of the building.
Arriving at 4 a.m. every morning, she is given plenty of opportunity to see behind the scenes and into the shady dealings of all who pass through PJC’s halls. and use its bathrooms. White’s work begins before students arrive, and ends long after they have gone home.
It’s clear that with the daunting and dirty job before her every day, White must have courage to brave the dark.
Coming into the school before the sun rises, White flips on all the lights in the building before getting to work.
“The first thing, I start off cleaning my ladies room, because it’s the nastiest, filthiest room on campus,” she said.
White opens the bathroom, pokes her head in the dimly lit stalls, and says, “It ain’t scary this morning. I don’t see toilet paper and stuff floating everywhere.”
Through the years, White has encountered things worth gossiping about, such as women’s underwear in the men’s bathroom. She shakes her head.
“I’m wondering, ‘All right, what was going on in here?'” And then I say, ‘I don’t want to know.'”
White’s previous experiences have prepared her for the dirty duties of cleaning the college.
“I was a nursing assistant for a long time. Stopped doing that when the AIDS thing went on,” she said.
Then she became a custodian.
“Years ago I did about three years as a temp. That’s how most of us custodians come aboard.”
By this point, White realizes that not everyone can handle the situations that she and her fellow custodians sometimes deal with.
“We’ve got some fantastic workers here. Not everyone can get up at three or four in the morning,” White said.
White has had brow-raising encounters in the classroom as well.
“We used to have a problem with transients sleeping here. They were hiding. You can’t open the door because they’re laying in front of it.”
In addition to dealing with vagrants, White has learned to ignore the haunting sounds of the creaking building as she works early morning hours alone.
“This is an old building that needs to be brought to the 21st century. You hear noises all the time. When it sounds like there’s someone walking up and down the stairs, I turn the music on.”
White jokes that the instructors in the building are boring, as she switches on the lights of another classroom. The sun is yet to rise.
“I wish I could find a teacher with a nice roulette table or slot machine in their office. These teachers take their job seriously.”
Examining the empty classroom, White retrieves a few forgotten pencils from the floor.
“People forget their items. I set the pencils and pens on my cart so if students need them, (I have them).”
Even after spending hours cleaning up after and helping students, White’s challenges follow her home. White is a single grandparent of two growing boys. After work, she fixes the boys’ lunches as they come home from school.
“My grandkids like to go and watch the planes take off,” White said, with a smile.
Shutting the door of a classroom and walking to the men’s bathroom, White pushes her cart.
“I got to know what I need to do. It takes ‘oomph’ to go anywhere in life.”
She has to have some “oomph” in order to spend day after day dealing with the dirt of PJC.
“Honey, it’s always an adventure here,” White said, chuckling as she grabs some cleaning supplies and a broom off of her cart.