With the semester coming to a close, I, for one, will be wishing the men and women who keep our campus running a happiest of holidays.I’m talking about our Facilities and Maintenance staff-unsung heroes who often remain backstage but keep our students and faculty fed, dorms and buildings warm, and campus beautiful, among many other things some of us tend to take for granted.

Every day is full of activity down in Facilities.

Truth be told, most of the workers are so busy keeping us alive and happy that they are hard to find for even a brief interview. I was, however, able to talk to Maintenance Supervisor Randy Rasmussen, who has been here for about three years and is one of the friendliest guys you’ll ever meet.

“I come from 30 years of facility managing,” said Rasmussen. “I was looking for early retirement, and have always vacationed at Myrtle Beach. When I heard about this job in North Carolina, me and my wife came down here and said ‘let’s have a look.’ It’s a dream come true.”

Randy oversees all the maintenance on a hands-on level. He is also required to help out the school with Community Restitution, a program that allows wayward students-underage drinkers, vandals, parking ticket scofflaws, etc.-to pay off their disciplinary dues by doing prescribed service for the school. I have had to log quite a few hours myself, and used to request Facilities work whenever I had a judicial hearing.

“If you get in trouble for drinking,” said junior Ian Young, “you usually have to do about 20 hours of community service. You can work in the library, or in the art building or something, but I liked to work in Facilities. The work isn’t too boring and I love Randy’s wisecracks.”

“Randy is the man,” said junior Henry Wells, who due to many parking infractions has fulfilled hundreds of hours of restitution. “Love that guy.”

“I never did restitution at any of the other schools I worked at,” said Rasmussen. “Down here I get more of an interaction with students, something I never had in any of my other managing jobs.”

One rung above Randy in the Facilities ladder is Associate Vice President of Operations and Facilities Jon Varnell. Like Rasmussen, Varnell has had a long history of working in the management of college facilities.

“I grew up in this business,” said Varnell. “It’s all I’ve ever done.”

As a student at Taylor College in Indiana, Varnell worked for Taylor’s Facilities, much like a work-study program at Guilford.

“Some students are more aware than others of (facility) staff presence,” said Varnell. “As a student I was very aware, got really involved and eventually became a supervisor.”

“I love the people I work with at Guilford. I’m not saying it’s all roses, but we have a good group of people and work much like a big family,” said Varnell.

I, myself, have had nothing but good relations with Facilities since my write-up glory days. Every time I drive by one of their golf carts I get a friendly wave, or maybe a thumbs-up sign-a compliment on my vehicle, which they have helped me keep running on countless occasions.

Without asking for anything in return, other than maybe some friendly conversation, I have been lent a Sawzall to mount my ill-fitting new radiator, a file to remove my busted ignition lock, various sockets of odd-ball sizes, and innumerable quips of hand-me-down automotive wisdom.

I love those guys. When Public Safety declared my car “abandoned,” I knew that at least one part of my school had my back: the people who know the meaning of getting your hands dirty and doing some real work like I had been doing for so long out in the cold parking lot.

So before you think about spray-painting a giant “heady nug” on the side of Duke, or drunkenly destroying a smoking gazebo, or even cutting copper pipe out of the basement of Hobbs, take time to think about the men and women who have to fix your mess after you. They are people too, in fact some of the nicest, most down to earth people at Guilford, and as a community we owe it to them to not only treat the school’s property with respect, but also to acknowledge the faithful staff for all the hard work they do on a daily basis. They are the lifeblood of our school, and without them we would be nothing.