Love a good underdog story? There’s an incredible one unfolding in Cambridge right now: MIT custodians just walked in on this brilliant math student cleaning up a heinously disgusting dorm toilet with ease.
How inspiring is that? It just goes to show that a background in advanced calculus doesn’t preclude you from janitorial excellence!
Earlier today, MIT’s head custodian, Yusuf Ekram, held a staff meeting about one of the filthiest bathroom stalls the university had ever seen in its 388-year history, informing his crew of young, aspiring custodians that “the janitor who is able to clean up the riddle of feces, urine, and used condoms overflowing from that toilet will have their name immortalized in print on the cover of The MIT Custodial Journal, the most renowned janitorial publication in the world.” When Ekram took his custodial crew to see the toilet in question, a scrawny, bespectacled MIT student toting several math textbooks was seen leaving the bathroom just as the janitors arrived. “Do the words ‘Out Of Order’ mean nothing to you, young man?” Ekram barked at the student, who meekly apologized as he fled down the hall.
Then, to Ekram’s shock, he pushed open the stall door and found the toilet in pristine condition, sparkling like new, flushing with ease, and smelling of lemon-scented cleaner. What had been a literal biohazard site of human waste an hour earlier was now the cleanest toilet on campus. “Which one of you did this?” Ekram asked his custodial team in awe, to no answer. Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in his head, and Ekram began running to find the math student he’d seen leave the bathroom.
That student was Charles Zhao, a Theoretical Mathematics major with a 4.0 GPA and an intellectual prodigiousness belying a preternatural ability for cleaning toilets. Since sanitizing the notorious toilet, the campus has been abuzz about Zhao, the “unlikely master janitor” who was wasting his custodial promise in the MIT math department, spending all his free time alone studying how to prove Dirichlet’s theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions from first principles.
Incredible. Who would’ve thought a math genius would turn out to be a once-in-a-generation janitorial talent?
Seeing Charles’ unlimited potential in dorm bathroom maintenance, Ekram has now taken it upon himself to help Zhao reach the highest levels of janitorialism. So far, to Ekram’s frustration, Zhao appears completely disinterested, politely declining Ekram’s offers to recommend him for custodial positions at America’s most elite businesses and institutions. Hopefully Zhao realizes that he’s so much more than MIT’s brightest math student, because it would be a shame to watch his custodial gifts go unused!
