[grammarnazzzi]

> Further, try to abide by their requests. If they want the trash can by the door to your office or cubicle on Thursday evening, move the damn trashcan to the door.

Better yet, take your damn trashcan out to the damn dumpster your own damn self.

Then we can save some damn money and fire the damn janitor.

> They have 100 to empty; it's a trivial task for you.

It's a trivial part of their job. They're getting paid for it.

[lhorie]

In Japanese schools, the kids are the ones doing the cleaning. Not just taking out the trash, but cleaning the blackboards, mopping the floor, tidying up the desks, cleaning the bathrooms, etc.

The reasoning isn't to save money, however. It is precisely to teach them there's no such thing as work that is beneath them.

[Gigachad]

Probably makes them respect the space more when they are responsible for keeping it clean.

[alliao]

my granddad who was educated by Japanese says the crappiest stuff that made you clean like you meant it; don't read on if you don't want to be obsessed with cleaning stuff.

on how to leaving any space... Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.

on how to clean... treat the object you want to clean like it's your soul

And man oh man did I wiped those mirrors...

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.

I love the Japanese ethos of Community (but don't always find myself in agreement with some of the other aphorisms, like "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.").

However, the person responsible for that gem has obviously never looked into a hawk's nest.

[bigDinosaur]

The idea of replicating this in a modern office is quite the amusing image. It strikes me as both true and false:

- no job is truly beneath me, and sometimes I have to wade into the weeds so better be prepared

- it's also a way to just get essentially free or cheap(er) labour by increasing the duties of those whose time would be better spent elsewhere.

[lhorie]

It's not all that different than going home and doing the cooking or the laundry. Surely you don't leave housework to your partner "because your time would be better spent elsewhere", right?

We don't think of brushing our teeth as "wading into the weeds", it's just an integral part of life for us. Cooking and laundry is (hopefully) just as much an integral part of life. Similarly, the Japanese famously don't have public trash bins everywhere and yet their streets are spotless because they consider public space cleanliness an integral part of life.

And one would hope that saying hi to people is an integral part of life too.

[bigDinosaur]

If I had the money I would pay for a cleaner in my house, for sure. I value cleanliness and relationships enough that of course I will do chores myself absent a cleaner, but I have no illusion that I am not trading my time and that my time would not be better spent doing other things.

[lhorie]

> I have no illusion that I am not trading my time

I think that's kinda the point of the article. The people that ignore janitors surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent elsewhere than talking to cleaning staff. Rich parents in Dubai surely are under no illusion that it is better to hire full time nannies than to waste their time raising their own kids. The people in Wall-E surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent entertaining themselves than, well, anything.

But as the increasingly absurd examples hopefully illustrate, not everyone thinks the same way. For example, my wife firmly believes that food that is paid for is intrinsically inferior, because, all else being equal, it's not made with the same level of care as if it was made by family (and this in fact can be a particularly noticeable observation if you come from a culture that takes pride in elaborate cuisine)

We all have things that we believe implicitly are a waste of our time, perhaps because of our upbringing or some other reason, but I think the overarching message of the article is that there are some things in life that we should not be compromising on, even if we did have all the money in the world.

[Dylan16807]

You need a level of care for that kind of cooking and raising children. You don't need much care for 95% of cleaning.

[benj111]

Cheaper labour?

Do you think the cleaner is paid more than the other workers???

[bkallus]

I went to an American private high school that also did this, although not everyone was thorough, so they had custodians clean every so often. In retrospect, it was kind of cool.

[JTbane]

I wish this culture existed in the USA, but knowing our society parents would be up in arms about kids doing unpaid labor or some bull.

[cma]

In the American version, Gingrich wanted just the poor kids to work as janitors in schools.

[FoomFries]

Trivialities in logistics and their impact on you as a person are two different things. If I added 500ms of latency to a keyboard (ssh, a bunch of VPNs, etc) I imagine a janitor would say ‘it’s a trivial part of your job, you’re getting paid for it.’ Yet that would cause many developers to pull their hair out.

[Shared404]

That's an extraordinarly good analogy, which I was not able to come up with myself despite thinking about it for a couple minutes. Thanks!

Source: Am currently doing server admin/code work, have done food service and janitorial in the past.

[Dylan16807]

Latency on everything is rather different.

If you made my deploys go from 30 seconds to 35, I don't think I'd care very much.

[laserlight]

Make the latency random for more fun.

[didericis]

It’s trivial to correct code formatting. You’re getting paid to code, presumably. What’s the better world: one in which your colleagues make a trivial effort to install a linter and make their code nicely formatted before handing it off, or one in which they don’t bother, say it’s trivial and part of your job for you to correct it, and then threaten to fire you?

[chillwaves]

It's disheartening how antisocial well paid coders seem to be. I mean that in the most literal way.

[denkmoon]

Life is nicer when you spend it being nice.

[bee_rider]

I don't mind taking out the trash but I think we'll need to have a janitor on staff because at least a few (figurative) bad apples will neglect to take theirs out, and they'll throw away (literal) apples, which will go bad, and then we'll get flies.

[JoeAltmaier]

Straw man? The example was moving the can near the door so the janitor could efficiently collect them, without for instance entering your office and perhaps upsetting cables, equipment etc.

Let's quit jumping to strawmen about doing the janitors job, shall we? It's just about being respectful of the guy in the job next to you.

[bee_rider]

The comment I was responding to suggested that people take out their own garbage and fire the janitor, that was the thought I was responding to. Perhaps that is the comment you meant to respond to?

I'm not sure if it is a strawman. They seem to be suggesting that going too farther in the direction of helping the janitor would remove the need for the janitor. To the extent that it is a strawman, I think they've even failed to beat up on their strawman, for the reason that I point out -- the janitor would still be necessary.