May 18th

Another activity I did at Gordon was taking care of some of the inventory that had to be done. To say the least, Gordon was not very organized. The concession room, which is closed after the basketball season ends, was a complete mess. There was leftover food such as skittles, snickers, M&M's, and popcorn still clogged in the popcorn machine. Apparently, this room was not a part of the janitor's responsibilities because it looked as if it had not been touched for several months. I was given the task of vacuuming the floor, cleaning and wiping down the popcorn machine, and finding a way to make everything appear neat. This took me roughly an hour and a half. When I was finished, I was under the impression that would be the extent of it. That turned out not to be the case at all. To the left of the entrance to the Bennett Center there is a small classroom. In the back of that classroom there is a door which leads to a storage room. This storage room could not have been more stuffed to the brim full of miscellaneous junk. The intramural sports at Gordon had thrown in all of their athletic equipment, and seemed to be battling the Athletic Department for space. There were two shelves which were completely full of championship and mvp trophies from throughout the years. My job was to categorize them by sport, year, player, and type of award. This was a lot easier said than done. The toughest part was lifting the top trophies down from the highest shelf and then carrying them out into the classroom to be sorted. They were really quite heavy. The part that took the longest was writing down each category of trophy. It did get quite monotonous but that was where I had to learn the lesson about continuing to push through when things got tough. It would have been easy to just give up, but I kept sorting the trophies. I approached it by putting myself in the mindset that I was getting paid to this job, even though I knew very well that I was not. It made it somewhat easier that way. The only other inventory issue that I had to take care of was in the storage room up by the turf field, the Brigham Athletic Complex. I had to count how many bottles of spray paint they had (the spray point that they used to line the field). This seemed to be a little bit pointless to me, as all the sports seasons had already ended, and there was really no need for the fields to be lined anymore. But this was another opportunity for me to learn another important life lesson, and I think I did just that.