The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college was my first time living independently, I had a day job, well a night job really. With my days off I bummed around with my friends who had far more interesting summer employment than I did. In the summer the university rented out the dorm buildings to different external programs, from academic conferences to sports camps. The typical staffing for a building was an on site manager, a customer service gopher, and two to three janitors. My friends had carefully stacked the deck in one of the buildings landing the manager, gopher, and one of the janitor positions in the same building.

As I didn’t technically work for that bit of the university I made my self scarce when folks were in the building, but for the downtime between groups they had a decent kitchen, comfortable couches, air conditioning, and people to socialize with, which were all nice draws. When all of our days off lined up, we engaged in noble college hobbies such as lock picking, climbing on top of buildings, or going down to the local river to swim. It was a pretty fun if not exactly one hundred percent responsible existence.

Late in the season the building manager grumbled one night at dinner that the next week they were getting a high school football camp, and he had been warned there was going to be a high school cheerleading camp in the building across the street. The consensus was, sure they’re dumb hormone fueled teenagers, but they can’t cause that much chaos, right? After dinner I headed off to the lab I was working in and wished my comrades good luck with their guests.

The next day I got a text message from the building manager, which was unusual when they had guests in the building. “Hey, you working tonight? If not can you drop by the building about 8 or so, we might need your help tonight” Good news I was in fact not working that night, and they had my interest. I showed up as the sun was setting to find the gopher sitting on the hill in the lawn of the building across the street, he had 4 lawn chairs and a cooler. So I sauntered over and asked him if this set up had anything to do with tonight’s “project”. It did, he gave me the run down the night before the kids in both the football and cheerleading camps had been flashing each other from their buildings, and a few of the more intrepid football players had even ventured across the street to pay the girls a visit. The coaches from both camps were rather displeased with this state of affairs. So we had been drafted for guard duty that evening.

I asked him about the cooler, and with a gleeful grin he cracked it open, sitting on top in a sealed bag were 4 cigars, under that two six packs of coke and a bottle of Jack. If we were stuck on guard duty there was no reason we couldn’t enjoy the assignment. About this time our intrepid janitor arrived, he was decked out in full black tactical gear, a headlamp, multiple flashlights strapped to his chest and arms, multiple knives too, but that bit wasn’t out of place for him. He had a car battery in each hand, and plopped those down next to his chair and settled in. The building manager was the last to arrive, and brought with him two flood laps that we attached to the car batteries.

We settled in in the darkness with our drinks and cigars and waited, but not too long. Soon there was a set of gyrating hips silhouetted in one of the windows on the football side, we aimed the flood lamps and lit them up. They scattered from the window. Then a few minutes later another, and another blast of light to dissuade them. The girls must have wrongly assumed we weren’t keeping an eye on their building too because the next window dancer came from their side, they got the same treatment to the same effect.

After a few rounds of back and forth with the lamps, we got our one and only runner of the night. This was our janitor’s moment to shine, he was a tall lanky cross country runner, so when we saw movement coming around the corner of the building he hopped up jogged over and just kept pace with the kid and had, according to his reports anyway, a very casual conversation “Hey how you doing, anything interesting going on this evening?” The kid got the hint and turned and ran back to the building, his tail broke off when he reached the door.

By 12:30 we had concluded that we had outlasted the campers as it had been quiet for the last hour. So we wrapped up our drinks and hauled our gear back into the building, and parted ways for the evening. The next evening they repeated their guard shift but I had to sit that one out and go to my actual paying job. From the report I got later the second night was much more boring, only a few window dancers and nobody had the poor sense to try and make the crossing. The coaches couldn’t argue with our results, and didn’t feel the need to argue with our methods, so mission accomplished.

None of the remaining groups in the last few weeks of the season were any near as interesting as that.

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Filed under: Auto-biographical - @ 2023-02-08 23:26

Tags: FridayNightStoryTime