Title: Custodial Joke
General Information about Item:
- Type: Verbal Lore (Joke)
- Language: English
- Origin: United States
- Informant: FO&M Custodial Worker (#11 informant consent form)
- Date Collected: 3/9/18
Informant Data:
- The informant has been working as a custodian for Dartmouth for over 20 years. He is in charge of keeping the interior of buildings on campus clean including one dorm building and one fraternity.
Contextual Data:
- While the informant enjoys connecting with students as they come and go from their dorm buildings, some days make for worse cleaning than others. After weekends, the informant explained, the bathrooms tend to take a little longer to deal with.
Item:
- The joke that the informant and other custodians make on Mondays after a fun weekend on campus goes like this: “Hey, I’ll give you five bucks if you clean the bathroom!” While he has never had a student take him up on the offer, the joke still serves to brighten a student’s mood on a Monday morning.
Informant’s Comments:
- “You would be amazed by what students are able to do to a bathroom on a Saturday night.”
Collector’s Comments:
- The more informants I interview from FO&M, the more I realize that the folklore within their departments are based on their valued interactions with Dartmouth students. This joke was another example of such an interaction.
Collector’s Name: Harlan Smart
Tags/Keywords:
- Verbal Lore
- Joke
- Custodian