This week, Fortune magazine pointed to a provocative essay by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell titled Hail the maintainers, which says that as a society, we are overvaluing innovators and desperately undervaluing the engineers, cleaners, repair technicians and service personnel that keep everything running.

Waves of “disruptive” new technologies and business practices may be giving us successive generations of maverick entrepreneurs, but someone had to make Elon Musk’s latte this morning and make sure it got to him in a clean cup. If he falls off his hoverboard and breaks his arm, an ER nurse is going to help diagnose him and patch him together again, but when will we get to hear her Ted talk?



I have endless respect for people behind the scenes keeping the world together. I remember the pride I once took in being a restaurant dishwasher. Yes, the job is, in some ways, at the bottom of the food chain. It’s typically the lowest-paid position in any restaurant, and yet there is a simple, satisfying power to it. To customers, you’re invisible, but you’re ultimately the person who is keeping them safe from germs and cross-contamination, an invisible lifeguard at life’s watering hole.

Each morning, you show up, put on an apron and then tackle the day’s mound of dirty dishes. It’s sweaty, sometimes backbreaking, work, but the core mission is always the same: make it all sparkle and put it back where it belongs. Keep everything moving. Everybody’s got to eat and if they’re going to eat, they’re going to need some dishes.

Not everyone appreciates the amount of work it takes to keep the things as they should be, though. I learned that right out of college, when I was working as a ward clerk on a pediatrics unit making $5.75 an hour. At the time, I was singing in a rock band and staying out all night. Being a young 20-something-year-old, one day I just didn’t have time to iron my white dress shirt. I decided to wear it crinkly and call it a look.

Halfway through my shift, one of the doctors on rounds asked me what kind of a shirt it was, that he hadn’t really seen one like it. With a start, I realized that he had probably never in his life seen a dress shirt that wasn’t fresh and starched on the hanger or disappearing into his clothes hamper at the end of the day. He was completely incapable of recognizing a white cotton dress shirt in its native state.

I said a quiet vow to myself on that day that I would never take for granted the labor going into keeping my world running. Doctor what’s-his-face, I realized, probably doesn’t even know the names of the workers – undoubtedly women and given that this is the South, probably women of color – who pressed his shirt. He probably thinks shirts come out of the dryer that way, if he thinks about it at all.

So maybe janitors, line cooks and hotel workers think I’m strange for thanking them on my way by. I don’t usually word it, “Thank you for holding the world together,” or at least I haven’t yet. But that’s exactly what they do.

