Kenversations™
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Custodial Central - A Busy Hive
Custodial Central is usually buzzing with activity. Round-the-clock Custodial operations for the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure, Disneyland Park, Downtown Disney, and Disney’s California Adventure are based here, as are the outside contractors. Custodial now has a radio channel for Disneyland Park, one for DCA, and another for "chat" and contractor traffic. The command center is manned by a clerk or two, answering phone and radio calls, checking people in, checking out radios and keys, keeping track of the hours cast members are working, etc. They are also the main communication link between Custodial and other departments.

There’s not a wasted inch in the place. There are information boards; a large marker board with the daily assignments of managers and foremen; workstations for writing up needed materials, including parade and Fantasmic! clean-up assignments; large posterboard cards to sign for people transferring, quitting, or retiring; the ever-important coffee machines, microwave, and water coolers; the copier; the conference room complete with marker board and television with VCR for training; the bull-pen of assistant manager desks in one room, the manager desks in others, and the office of the Director of Custodial.

Up until relatively recently, Custodial did not have a Director all to itself. Our overall manager, Ray Sidejas, was only the third person to ever head up the department, and that’s counting the manager that was in place when Ray was helping to open Disneyland Paris. Custodial has always taken pride in being committed to Walt’s ideals and having a high number of people who have been in the operation for a long time, giving it a strong sense of continuity and legacy. When the management structure was set up for DCA and DTD, those areas were given to Mike Sweeney, a manager who was promoted from under Ray to a position parallel to him. Ray stayed put, and park veteran Matt Gray was placed over both of them in the new position of Director of Custodial.

I was assigned to be the foreman for Adventure / Frontier (one of my favorite areas) almost two weeks ago, when the schedule came out. Each area has its own personality, and as such, everyone has different preferences. I like Adventure / Frontier.

The Clock Starts
"Any radios?" I ask the clerk, who tells me they are all out. The two-way radio is our comfort blanket, our link to everything, and the bane of our day. It is our symbol of power and status. Indeed, when someone is disciplined and is relieved of Foreman duty (usually due to attendance problems), it is said that they’ve "lost their radio". We use it to get a hold of Security, the office, or our peers. It is also what is used by our managers and clerks to call us to relay messages.

The clerk checks me in and hands me the keys for my area. A competent, pleasant clerk with a sense of humor is priceless.

I pull my schedule for the day out of the folder and give it a quick look. "Who ARE these people? Anyone know who X is? Can she do trash? Oh no, I have Y in my area. Hey, at least Z is on my crew today." These are just some of the things uttered at this point. Hopefully, I remember to grab a bunch of park maps to supply my crew with.

I make a few copies of the schedule in the copier. If I’d been earlier, I would have sat in the conference room with the rest of the leads and worked on the schedule, technically before being on-duty. As it is now, I take a quick glance at it to start toying with plans for the day. It is a little past 6 and most of the leads are still sitting around the conference room table.

We head off to our respective duties, dodging delivery and trucks and other vehicles. The packer (trash compactor) behind Main Street is being put back into place after having been taken away and emptied. I go onstage by Lost & Found, noticing the flyers on the backstage side of the door, and cut across the street, into the men’s restroom, and out the back door to the backstage area on the westside of Main Street. Large green dumpsters for recycling cardboard fill up the space between the building and the Jungle Cruise boat storage area.

I go this way to retrieve my hidden metal and pan and broom. I have a locker for them between Fantasyland and Frontierland, but when work started on changing Casa Mexicana to Rancho Del Zocalo, it was too inconvenient to get to. For many years, Custodial Central was back there behind the Casa Mexicana / Mineral Hall façade, near Big Thunder train storage.

Metal pans are not being bought anymore. They are being replaced by plastic pans that are lighter and generally easier on the sweeper’s arms. I want to end my days as a sweeper with a metal pan, for traditional reasons I’m not going to get into here.

After passing between Aladdin’s Oasis and the Jungle Cruise, I walk through Adventureland, where Night Custodial is still doing their thing, as are Landscaping cast members. I go backstage via the door by Bengal Barbecue, navigating my way past everyone is working back there while a radio blasts away.

Backstage
This particular backstage area is an "island". The only way to get to it or away from it is by going through onstage areas. There's a packer; drums for grease; an area with a hose and grated drain; access to the Golden Horseshoe, Bengal Barbecue, River Belle Terrace, Stage Door Café, and shop stock closets; cast member restrooms; stairs to a semi-enclosed break room and offices, and stairs to an underground storage area (not a tunnel system!).

The break room had booths, a television, vending machines, a drinking fountain, pay phones, and an arcade game.

You can always find cast members smoking in an outside backstage area, and you can usually find official message boards and unofficial fliers of all sorts.

There's also the Custodial area locker.

Opening Up
I walk to the Custodial area locker (a supply closet) and unlock it, surveying the inside. Depending on how busy it was the night before, and who was working in that area, things could be anywhere from perfect to horrifying. The closet could be in disarray and depleted of stock, there could be no pan and brooms for the crew, stuff like that.

Ideally, the locker area is going to have a bunch of pan and brooms in good condition, mop handles, mop heads, and a mop bucket, pushbrooms, buckets, and long and a short handle picker, various chemicals, paper towels, cloth towels, a Lost & Found bag (hopefully empty), clip boards, and more. There are always signs and memos offering reminders about policies and procedures. Checking the packer to make sure it is empty enough and that it functions is a good idea. There’s nothing like having your packer fill up on a busy day when the park is still open for several hours. That means hauling trash to a packer that’s further away.

The backstage area can get quite cluttered with stock for the shops and restaurants that is being delivered and all sorts of equipment, including the large carts used by sweepers to haul the trash from the cans to the packer.

I plunk down the maps and the schedules and pick up a bucket and the short-handle picker, ready to check out the damage from the previous day.

The closing shift Day Custodial is supposed to make sure the flowerbeds (generic term for landscaped areas) are picked clean of trash, that the waiting areas were swept clean, and that the trashcans were fairly empty. It doesn’t always turn out that way. Night Custodial does the heavy cleaning, including hosing down the walkways. In the morning, we’ll do things like check the building fronts, remove gum, check the flower beds, and take care of any standing water night crew couldn’t get to.

It is good to check in the with the Night Custodial cast members and find out what is going and what I need to be aware of. We see almost every inch of the backstage and onstage every day, so we’re up on what needs to be fixed and how to handle certain realities.

Magic Morning doesn’t currently extend to this side of the park. All vehicles have to be moved out of the onstage Magic Morning areas, but they are still out in my area. Things are still in overnight mode, with doors to the backstage wide open and vehicles of various sort zipping by. Food and drink products crowd the back area, waiting to be taken to where they’ll be sold.