Hey Dave," beamed Kathy. "How are you doin' today?"

At the time, I was doing about as well as the Pirates have done in recent pennant series. I was burned out on my classes. I was sick of my activities. The only thing I really enjoyed anymore was listening to Van Halen tapes, and even that got depressing if I tried to play along on guitar. It seemed that my life, in the words of William Shakespeare, was "full of sound and fury, but ultimately pretty lame." Or something like that.

So I was trudging along, contemplating the idea of becoming a Physics 201 word problem ("A frustrated undergraduate leaps out a window with an initial velocity of 6 meters per second. . .") when Kathy hailed me. She was pushing her green utility cart down the hall, getting ready to scrub the unflushed toilets in my floor's (heavily abused) bathroom. And she was smiling. Suddenly, my own situation seemed a little more bearable.

"I'm doing all right," I replied, smiling back a little. "Yourself?"

"Oh, I'm fine," she said, disappearing around the corner.

Kathy is the cleaning lady for my dormitory floor (Atherton Seven, proudly known as "the floor that forgot to name itself"). She's also a candidate for sainthood, or at least she ought to be, if you ask me. Joan of Arc got to be a saint after she was burned at the stake, and for those of you who've never seen our bathroom, trust me: Kathy goes through a lot more every day than Joan ever had to.

To start, the bathroom floor has two large depressions strategically located about 15 feet from the floor drain. This creates a very fungus-friendly effect once the showers are running, in that most of the floor surface becomes submerged in a body of water large and deep enough to warrant a lifeguard. My resident assistant, a master of subtlety, has dubbed this "Lake Pubic Hair." We're thinking of developing it as a tourist attraction, and maybe adding some sand and a few waterslides.

(Speaking of water recreation, the cherished Atherton Seven tradition of tackling people, hauling them into the bathroom and ceremonially tossing them into a bathtub full of ice water on their birthday probably doesn't help the floor to dry very quickly.)

If a person is a skilled enough swimmer to cross the floor, he or she will undoubtedly notice another fascinating detail of our bathroom: people spray everywhere but in the actual toilet bowls when they pee. From the looks of it, either a lot of people do this, or somebody's using a SuperSoaker on the toilet seats. However, before you dismiss us as disgusting slobs, I'd like to point out that it's really not our fault. It's the lifeguard. A bunch of us will be standing in the stalls, aiming as best we can, when he'll suddenly blow his whistle, startling us. (Ladida, ladida. . ."TWEEEEET!" AAAUUGH! Whoops.)

Add that to the fact that there seems to be a consensus opposition on my floor to flushing -- I think it's a guy thing -- and. . .well, trust me; it's pretty bad. By the way, that's not even mentioning what a drunk "guest" did in one of the bathtubs the other weekend.

Now you know what Kathy has faced every day for the past two years: it's as if a mad scientist went into his lab and combined a flooded basement and a bedpan. If only for never screaming and running away, Kathy deserves a medal or two. However, not only has she put up with cleaning our hall and bathroom every day, she's done an exemplary job of it and befriended the whole floor as well.

From the day she started working here, Kathy has gone out of her way to learn the names of everybody in our hall. I have never seen her walk past anyone without greeting them and asking them how their day is going. At the end of each semester, Kathy tapes a greeting card to the wall of the bathroom, wishing us a happy break and thanking us. (For what? Throwing each other into bathtubs and soaking the floor? Mysteriously getting blobs of toothpaste on the ceiling?)

It must take willpower Gandhi could only dream about to be that pleasant to people while cleaning their bathrooms all year. I know I could never do it. Within a few days, I'd probably snap my mop in half and use the handle as a weapon, like Linda Hamilton did against the hospital guard in Terminator 2. (WHAP! "WHY CAN'T YOU PEE IN THE TOILET BOWL?! ARE YOU BLIND?!!" WHAP!) Then, once my victims were unconscious, I'd drown them in Lake Pubic Hair while the lifeguard wasn't looking.

I've never heard Kathy complain about the thankless and often disgusting work she has to do; in fact, the only time I ever saw her upset was when she thought she might be moved to a different building and wouldn't be able to see us anymore. And she gets everything flawlessly clean, day after day. If perseverence, patience and good humor were grams of cocaine, Kathy would have a higher street value than the entire nation of Colombia. (That analogy would make a good Hallmark card, I think.)

The reason I'm yammering about all this is that I'm moving to an apartment in the fall, and I wanted to let Kathy know how much I'll miss her next year. (Not just because I'll have to start cleaning my own bathroom, either.) At a school so full of cliques and strangers who would sooner avert their eyes than greet you, Kathy's unconditional friendliness and cheer have been a very welcome relief, and the diligence and quiet consistency of her work have left a stronger impression on me than my contact with all but a few of my professors.

So, Kathy: for making a dormitory in a large, often impersonal university seem a little more like a home, thanks. We might not tell you enough, but the guys on the floor appreciate you an awful lot.

And we're sorry about the toilets.