Though some students rarely think of how buildings’ floors stay clean or how the power comes back on after a storm, there are men and women who make their living working at the University, but they are not part of the administration, nor are they teachers.

For keeping buildings clean, maintaining landscaping and making sure classrooms have electricity, the University has approximately 530 facility employees on its payroll, UA Spokesman Chris Bryant said.

Todd Glasscock, a UA electrician, said his job is to make sure all buildings and classrooms have the ability to run the technology that professors and students need.

“A typical day for me is resetting breakers, keeping check on contractors, locating lines and dealing with outages in building,” he said.

Campus secretaries are not always easy to worth with, Glasscock said, but he enjoys the electrical line locations on which he works. He also said students should take into account the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep the University running smoothly.

“Without what we do, students would not have a university to go to,” he said.

Adron Oliver, a junior majoring in nutrition, said she rarely thinks about how vital facility employees are to the University.

“I see men and women working around campus, whether it be landscaping or working on electrical systems, but I rarely have thought about the important part that they play for students,” she said.

Students often get caught up in thinking about their classes and getting their education, Oliver said, and they don’t think about the people who work for the University in maintaining the campus.

“I realized after thinking about it that facility employees do so much more for students than we realize,” she said. “When the power goes out, when something breaks, when something needs to be improved, these are the people who do this work, and we should recognize them more than we do.”

Leon Taylor, another UA facility employee, said there is nothing mundane about his work.

The best part of the job, Taylor said, is being able to interact with large numbers of people and helping them in any way he can. However, he said, Game Days present obstacles he said he doesn’t usually face.

“There is no normal day,” Taylor said. “One day we are moving the new nursing school in, and the next it will be something completely different.”

To apply for a job at the University, Bryant said, visit www.jobs.ua.edu.