Some 30 years ago I was walking with the director of facilities through the library basement at Vanderbilt University. A custodian was working nearby and, as the director and I stopped to talk, I felt someone grab my arm firmly near the shoulder. "Your going to take away my job, aren't you." Whoops, where did this come from? The custodian had a very firm grip and very worried expression on his face as he stood there looking at me. "Why, no I'm not", I managed to stammer out.
I was shaken by the incident. The custodian walked away with his push broom and an uncomfortable demeanor. He was clearly not happy and certainly not comforted by my words. The director managed to smooth over the incident and we continued our building tour. But how do you ever forget someone accusing you of trying to take their job away, especially when you are only there to install an energy management system?
This was the mid-70's and energy management was brand new. It was hot! Long car gas lines convinced a lot of people that they needed to take action on the building energy front. (The two are not connected but I was still happy they thought so.) IBM was telling their customers that they had a computer which would do the job and my company, Monitortek, was their partner in making it happen. Why did this custodian think energy management would take his job away? Why did the concept threaten him so? What did he know that I didn't about energy management?
Getting through college
Later that day the director started spinning stories for me (he was a fantastic story teller). It was near the end of the Great Depression when jobs were very hard to find (25% unemployment and at least that number under-employed.) He was a poor boy from Tennessee who wanted to attend college. Somehow the dean found out about him and was determined to see he got through school - some way, some how. The problem was finances. His family was poor and there was no way he could attend what was widely regarded, he said, as a rich white girls school.
So the dean put him to work as a custodian. He was to sweep floors and do the other odd jobs that custodians normally handle. The custodial work force was all black. He was the poor white boy working with the black custodians at a rich white girls school. I noted the interesting contrast.
He was an outgoing young man and made friends with the custodial staff quickly. They taught him the ropes so he could earn his pay. Then finally, after four years, graduation day arrived and there he was, walking with the other seniors along an interior Vanderbilt road near the power house. They were marching to the outdoor ceremony location on the green lawn down the hill. It was a warm, early summer day. The black custodians were all gathered alongside the road waiting for their friend to come marching by.
It wasn't long before they saw him coming. They started making noise about him in that graduation gown. And he couldn't disappoint them. For the entire time he was on campus he was poor. Shoes were hard to pay for. The war was on and employment had picked up for the country. But the working situation for his comrades in the custodial ranks was basically unchanged.
Here he was, a poor boy about to receive a university degree from a premier learning institution. How should he react to their cheers? What should he say? As he marched by them he couldn't resist the temptation to show them he had not forgotten his roots; that he was not "above" them but only someone who was lucky enough to get a degree. Suddenly he raised his gown and jumped up in the air with his bare feet sticking out from underneath. Yep, he had no shoes on! The custodians just howled. He was one of them. He was still a poor boy who made good. And he didn't forget his friends of the past four years.
What was he thinking?
So what was that custodian thinking that caused him to grab my arm? Was it part of the educational gap between us? Did I realize the impact a custodian could have on our new energy management system? I did not. I was too inexperienced. I grew up in a town of factory workers where management would regularly "take names, and kick butt" if you didn't cooperate adequately. Where the UAW ruled with an iron hand in contract negotiations over threat of a huge strike. Where workers were treated like chattel. And management thought they were all-powerful. But they weren't. It took Edward Deming and the Japanese to show them how to do it right.
From my perspective it was all about technology. Whoever installed the most effective technology would do the best job in controlling energy. I was certain of it. In the end, however, I was wrong. It was and still is about empowering people to use the technology available to them.
The U.S. temperature controls industry didn't have the equivalent of the Japanese to kick their collective butt. At least it didn't until upstarts like my company came along. We began to puncture their huge, over inflated bags of wind. But it was only a pinprick. We were a gnat to them, which they periodically swatted or captured into a jar by buying us or our technology when they had to. So their actions further convinced me and my peers that the solution to energy management was technology.
But like the Vanderbilt director it really was about the people who made the buildings run smoothly. It's the little actions that can save energy every day of every week. The problem is identifying those actions and training people how to use them for saving energy. It's really about energy awareness within the context of the engineering impact small actions can have.
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