Support system | Whether it's couriers or copier repair technicians, Maine businesses rely on a host of service providers to run smoothly. Now, they tell their side of the story.

You see them every day, or you see the evidence of their work. You may never give them a second thought, or you may count on them to show up at your office every day at a specific time. They're the ones working after hours, or dropping everything to answer an emergency call. They don't run the business, but they are the support personnel who keep businesses in Maine running.

While not the most glamorous jobs in the economy, service providers who move documents between locations, repair vital equipment, and keep buildings in shape or offices clean are crucial to Maine's commercial sector. It's such a disparate group of companies that there's no data readily available on how big a contribution they make to the Maine economy. But even without employment figures or industry size numbers, most office workers in the state — if they stop to think about it — will realize how much they count on certain services to keep their operations running smoothly. With that in mind, Mainebiz decided to check in with a handful of workers in the office support system to learn more about their jobs: how they spend their days, what kind of relationships they have with the businesses that hire them, and what they think about being somewhat in the shadows of
Maine business. Edited transcripts of our interviews follow.

Charlie Richmond
Job: Courier
Company: Uniship Courier Services, Hermon

I'm working almost 60 hours a week. A lot of my deliveries are inter-office stuff — something's gotta go from an office in Bangor to an office in Portland or Libson. A lot of lawyers hire us to bring envelopes they need to get somewhere, and as long as they call us around nine o'clock, we can deliver that day. Our big customers have a contract with us and we do all their work. Quest [Specialty Labs in Massachusetts] and Bangor Savings Bank are our two biggest ones.

Mostly it's just the banks and the state labs everyday, but you never know what'll get thrown in there. The weirdest thing I've carried would probably be eyeballs. We did a lot of work at one point for the [New England] Eye Bank in Massachusetts. People donate their eyes for cornea transplants, and they'd send them up on an airplane in a cooler to Bangor International Airport. Since it's a body part, the pilot actually keeps it right there beside him, in a sealed container. You'd pick it up and deliver it to one of the hospitals.

There's a lot of logistics involved in the courier business and that pretty much falls on the dispatcher, who knows where everybody is throughout the day. We put down all the times when we get someplace or when we leave, so when somebody calls who needs a pickup, we know who's in the general area and they can page us or call us on a company phone. Everybody wants you to pickup at 5 p.m. and it's like, "Ah, we can't be everywhere at once at five o'clock." But we do our best.

I get to see lots of interesting people, and I get to know them quite well because I see them on a daily basis. A lot of times I'm in a hurry so I'm in and out, but sometimes you can just stay there and chat for a while. Other times, somebody says, "Oh, wait a minute, I've got something for you," so you chit-chat. At basically all my stops I've come to know them as good friends.

What else do I do during the day? Pretty much try not to get in any accidents and not to get any speeding tickets — which is hard to do, especially in the wintertime. We worked all through the ice storm, and any snow storms. Some customers, like the banks, need their work done every single day, so it doesn't matter what the weather is. The company [spends] money on real good snow tires, and I can move pretty good with them. But sometimes you just can't get anywhere when there's 20 cars backed up behind the snowplow or something like that. There's no way around it. You just have to grin and bear it and entertain yourself.

I listen to a lot of books on tape — that keeps me busy. Sometimes it's very exciting to come to work when you got a good book going and you want to get to it. I listen to a lot of Stephen King. The Dark Tower series was excellent — it was like a seven-book thing and it came with like 22 CDs in each book. I used to keep track of all the books on tape that I've listened to and I just stopped because there was just too many.

Steve Eaton
Job: Copier repair man
Company: Eaton Copier Service, Portland



I have 500 customers that can call me at any time, from Freeport to Kennebunkport. I have big clients and I have a lot of home-based people — travel agents or home-based businesses. It's the small desktop copier all the way up to the big ones at places like Mercy Hospital, which is a big account.

The first thing I do every day is check my phone messages and e-mails, and set up my calls for the day. I can have anywhere from three to six messages and a couple of e-mails. I kind of prioritize whose call might be more urgent — some of them have a lot of panic in their voices. Some people really need something out that day. Maybe it's a church bulletin that needs to get out that day, and they have volunteers coming in to run the copier. If the copier's jammed, they'll have volunteers all standing around. I do anywhere from six to eight calls in a day. Some slow days I only get three or four calls in, but then I'll come back to the office and get some paperwork done. Maybe once a week I'll get a slow day.

Most of the copiers today will put out a code to the technician. I can look up that code in the manual and it directs me to an area of concern. It might be a broken bulb or a scanner cable, or it could be time for a periodic maintenance call. I've pulled a person's scarf out of the feeder on the copier. She must have been too close to the feeder and it got sucked it right in. I have repaired cracked glass, but nobody owns up to how it's gotten broken.

Most of the time, I can repair a problem onsite with parts I have on hand. Worst-case scenario, I can overnight parts. I have a truck, and I have all my parts in the back of it because I have to service all makes and models of copiers and fax machines. I keep what they call high-mortality parts on hand — belts, feed rollers, toners.

It's mostly a good reception when I arrive. [Companies] just can't seem to get the cogs working without their printer and their copier. It really slows them down. Sometimes I'll even get cheers — "Here comes our hero," they'll say. The happiest people to see a copier technician are probably the ship captains. I've had a captain tell me that his copier was more valuable to him than his compass. They're at sea all the time, and they go to foreign ports and no one can fix them. The copier must be part of their chain of command — things gets copied and given to all of the crew.

You never know where you are going to be at any day or time. That's what makes it so interesting. One day I could be in an oil tanker, and the next day I can be at the top of a control tower at the airport fixing their fax machine. I used to work for the FBI in Portland. I had to get the highest level of security because I'm working on a copier and copiers can be breached. They said a copier tech can come in and put a special device in a copier that could read their originals. It's some real Mission: Impossible stuff. They ran me through this huge interview — I never knew I had that much of a life. They went up and down and then they said, "Okay, you have security now." So now I have highest security level for the FBI.

Joan McLeod
Job: Assistant property manager for 477 Congress Street, better known as the Time and Temperature building
Company: Boulos Property Management, Portland

I started here in 1976. I started in the parking garage, part-time. Thirty years later I'm still here, and I don't think I'll ever be able to leave. It's a very interesting building. We have wonderful tenants and I love them. The people made me want to stay.

We've built a relationship with these tenants — some of them have been here over 20 years. We have attorneys. We have therapists. We have banking. We have advertising. Accountants. A hairdresser. An employment agency. We now have a fitness and wellness center. It's a very diverse group of people. There are about 300 people in the building.

You never get bored on this job. It's a very busy building, with 14 floors of tenants. Usually, the phone is always ringing. No two days are alike. You can't say, "I'm going to go in today and sit at my computer and get caught up," because it doesn't happen.

We've had chaotic times here over the years. One time on the ninth floor we had a pipe break and water burst a hole through the wall and the tenants were bailing water out the windows with their shoes. Many years ago, they closed off from Preble Street to Commercial Street because big chunks of the roof were blowing off.

My family even lived in the building for a few years because there were a lot of repairs being done. My husband worked here too — he was the maintenance supervisor — and we had a little apartment up in the building so we could be here 24 hours a day. We lived there for about three or four years.

When we first came here, the building was really in bad shape. Part of the roof at that time blew off. The 14th floor was empty and we had sheets of plastic tied to the rafters. Until the new roof got put on, my kids and I would be in water all night because the water would be pouring down. Pipes would break. There was a lot of different stuff. The sprinkler system let go one time, and it hadn't been used in years so all the black stuff squirted out everywhere. We scrubbed day and night to clean that up. Those were things that were just part of the job.

I have an emotional attachment to this building, very much so. You can't help but grow attached. I've seen so much evolve and I've seen so many tenants. When tenants leave after many years, it's like losing a good friend, even though I've never seen them outside the building. One day, I thought we were having an ice cream social and they surprised me with a beautiful plaque [of myself that still hangs] on the wall in the lobby. But I was serving ice cream. I had ice cream dripping off my hands.

One of our former tenants walked in the building once, and I walked out the door and he said, "Oh Joan, I'm glad to see you. I walked in the building last week and saw the plaque and thought, 'Oh my God, she died.'"

Brad Manter
Job: Confidential material shredder
Company: Without a Trace Document Destruction, Scarborough

We're a mobile shredding service, so we've got a shredding truck — we take the truck to the customer's location and do the shredding right there in the truck. The whole purpose of that is so that when we drive away everything is already destroyed and nothing can fall into the wrong hands. It's a very secure process.

It's a big, low-speed, high-torque shredder. The shredder itself is probably four feet wide, and there's a tipper on it, so we take an entire recycling-size bin and it dumps right down on top of the shredder. Once shredded, it gets pushed through a compactor into the back of the truck. The back two-thirds of the truck is just empty space, and that's where all the shredded material goes. We take everything to a recycling center and it eventually gets mixed with everyone else's stuff and bailed up and made back into paper. That recycling part of the process is also part of the security process. We don't just take it to the dump after that.

In a typical day, there's usually a combination of small and medium purges — where someone is purging an entire year or several year's worth of material — combined with scheduled work, where we come by monthly or every six weeks or every two weeks or whatever we've set up for that customer, and they have been collecting documents to shred all during that period. The typical customers are some of the obvious ones: medical practices, dental practices, accountants and law offices. Then there are the financial companies like mortgage companies or insurance companies — we get a fair amount of those. But the fact is, most businesses have information on paper that they need to be careful with — it's just a question of how much they have. I get manufacturers down in Saco with sensitive information about products and production processes, internal, company info they don't want to get in wrong hands.

We can shred most anything, though. We often will do computer disks, hard drives, packaging that's been printed wrong but that you wouldn't want to take to dump because you don't want someone else to start using it with your name on it. I'm not doing any of this right now, but there are companies elsewhere in the country that shred security uniforms that go unused. There's somebody that shreds seconds of running shoes, stuff they produce but can't sell. Basically, when you look at something and say, "I don't want this to fall in wrong hands," we can do that.

I see our role as making a dull but important task really easy and almost invisible to businesses. That's the nature of outsourcing, anyway. There are things that are not part of your core business, but they have to be done, and our job is to make it clean and simple and neat — and make it like we were never there. All I want my customers to see is that nice looking console in their office, and never have to think about, "Is it time to shred stuff?

It's kind of funny balance. You want to make it almost invisible, and yet you've got to keep making sure they understand there's value in that so they keep paying the bills.

One thing that happens when people do their own shredding is that even though shredding is important, it's one of the last things you do. Everything else is going to take priority over that, except maybe cleaning the office, and people hire that out too. As a result, now you've got information you've decided is sensitive and should be shredded, but you're leaving it around and not taking care of it on a regular basis.

Tara Colello
Job: Office cleaner
Company: Tara's Cleaning Service, Portland

I would have never envisioned myself being the cleaning lady. I actually did it with my parents growing up and I swore I would never do it on my own. But for now it works out perfect with the kids and lifestyle that my husband and I have, and it's worked out monetarily, as well.

It's definitely different to be [in offices] when no one's there and it's quiet. You hear noises; sometimes you jump. One of the brokers [at A.G. Edwards, one of my clients,] loves to scare me when he knows I'm there by myself. It can definitely be spooky, especially when I take out the trash afterwards. I always try to make sure that if it's going to be late at night I have somebody with me. But I have really safe buildings — that's something that I look for — so that I know the door's going to lock behind me or that there are alarms, just so I feel comfortable on my own. It's neat, too, because I feel like I'm part of the company in a way, even though I'm there after hours.

I listen to music while I work. The quiet sometimes — just because I have four children — is hard to deal with. My 16-year-old daughter comes with me sometimes. One night for some reason we were being extremely silly. We were hollering to each other across the office and noticed that a broker had a client in their office. We felt horrible and wrote a big, long apology.

I love studying people. I'm a people watcher. Being in the office you can tell a lot about people, about their personality and their likes and dislikes, just by the pictures they have around them. You can tell if they're organized or not by the floor, how messy it is around the desk. You can definitely tell a lot by what's left behind about what kind of day they had.

I'm really careful to make sure that things are the way people left them. I think that's important to people. If you have a lot of high-end merchandise they want to see it where they left it the night before. It's an extra precaution that I have to take when I'm in a building. I think sometimes [my job] gets taken for granted, but after [a business] has had a bad experience with a cleaning person — which unfortunately happens a lot — then they appreciate you a lot more.

I'm really very lucky to be respected and appreciated. The people that I deal with make me feel like I'm as much a part of the company as if I were the eye doctor or the stockbroker. So I really don't feel like there's that [cleaning lady] stigma. Maybe it's because of the way I view it, as well. I feel like I'm trying to help them run as effectively as possible during the day. And if there's a mess around their trashcan, instead of being aggravated about it, I really try to feel that they must have had an extremely busy day and I just try to make it easier for them when they come in the next day.

Just having an open line of communication with the office managers has really worked out well — and also learning how to not take offense when they want something done differently or tell you that you're missing something. I've also noticed that what's important to one office is not going to be important to the other. I have one client where vacuuming is the biggest deal. I have another one where there needs to be no fingerprints on the glass or mirrors. So it really depends on the account, and that takes a while to understand. And that's where the open line of communication has to come in, because you don't want to lose the account and they don't want to look for a new cleaning person.

I think the biggest thing for me is that when somebody walks into a room that I've cleaned, I want them to know I was there, and to make that happen I have to do a good job and make it look organized. I definitely look at a room in a different way now — I just noticed dust along your baseboard.