I rode down the elevator with our office building janitor today.  He’s a nice guy.  Hispanic dude in his mid-forties.  He speaks English very well which is great when you consider that the only Spanish I speak is what I learned on Steve Martin stand-up comedy albums when I was a kid. “Donde esta casa de pepe?”  which Steve Martin thought was “Excuse me, where is the bathroom?”  Or, literally, “Where is the pee pee house?”  Actually, there is no word “pepe” in Spanish.  I checked on my Spanish/English translator on Google.  The closest thing I could find was that Pepe is a guy’s name in Spanish.  This statement is really nonsense and means “Where is the house of Pepe?” So, Steve Martin’s Spanish was no good to me.  I was glad that we could rely on my native language, not my janitor’s.

I’ve written about this guy before.  He does a good job of keeping our bathrooms clean and seems to be very conscientious about the quality of his work.  He really goes above and beyond.  He wipes down the top of the toilet seats with sanitizing spray and really gets every nook and cranny.  I honestly appreciate his efforts.  But the thought dawned on me, while trapped in the same 6×6 foot space with him for two straight minutes, that I didn’t have a clue what to say to him.  I never talk to him.  I know that he knows me because he’s seen me in there using the facilities through the crack between the stall door and privacy wall.  He’s acknowledged me walking in while he was working in there a few times too.  But, this situation made it very clear to me that I don’t know how to start up small talk with our janitor.

I had to dig deep.  He was standing two feet from me.  I couldn’t just act like he wasn’t there.  I thought to myself, most conversations start with banter about common things, so I quickly mulled over a few options.  We can’t really talk about the weather because we generally only see each other in the can.  It’s almost always the same temperature in there and the same lighting conditions.  The humidity varies, depending on who was in there last, but it’s mostly climate controlled.  So, the weather was out.  I’d seen him working with a young boy before so I could ask him if it was his son that helped him out with his cleaning duties occasionally.  But that would start a conversation that would go way beyond the minute or so I had left with him.  So, that was no good.  I could bail on the conversation entirely and stare and my iPhone like many do, but that’s a cop out.  I legitimately wanted to engage this guy – I wanted to do him a solid and make him feel good.

So, I made eye-contact with him.  I was going to hit him hard with something witty yet sincere.  All that came out was, “You really do a great job keeping the rest rooms nice.”  I felt like an instantaneous douche.  I might as well have said, “You sure do a nice job of keeping the pubes off of the toilet seats and the piss dribbles managed on the floors in front of the urinals.”  I was a total dick.  Completely, without even trying.  He said, “Thank you.”

The door to the elevators opened, we smiled at each other, I bid him good day,  and we each went on our way.  I’m not sure what the lesson is here.  Be careful who you hop in the elevator with, I guess?  Or maybe, “Hi, how are you?” actually is a perfectly acceptable greeting.  I know that’s a rhetorical question because no one really wants to hear any other answer besides “Great, thanks for asking.”  Sometimes, not looking like a total tool is a victory in and of itself.