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"Roll your window down, it's hot in this old raggedy truck," Steve Conklin
yelled over at a visitor as he climbed behind the wheel.
It's the Tuesday morning of the second week of July, and even at 8 a.m. you
could tell it was going to be a scorcher. Conklin is paid to pay particular
attention to days like these. His official title may be different and his
responsibilities more diffuse, but to most people on campus he's simply the "AC
guy" and summer is his season to sweat.
The clipboard on the seat next to him attests to that fact. It is filled with
yellow work orders, each filled with the same common complaint: "No AC."
"I can stay busy," Conklin said. "I've got so much work to do it's pitiful."
Still, it's the kind of job that suits Conklin: Everybody is almost always
happy to see him and almost always grateful after he goes for the cool air he
leaves in his wake.
There are, of course, exceptions. Some people let him have it when they think
he should have fixed their air conditioning yesterday. Some get frustrated
after he fixes a unit and it breaks down again a few days later. Conklin gets
frustrated, too. Learning to deal with that frustration, he has discovered, is
all part of the job as well.
Nobody has to tell Conklin how miserable it is to work where it's hot. When he
started at the University some 10 years ago, he worked in the steam boiler
plant on Cameron Avenue. And, of course, there's his old raggedy truck.
Conklin pointed a laser temperature probe at the floorboard and the probe
flashed "104." The brick wall outside, in contrast, read only "84."
Got any air conditioning in this thing?, the visitor asked.
"Just 55 and three," Conklin answered.
"What's that?"
"Fifty-five miles per hour and three windows, counting the sliding glass in the
rear window. That's all the air conditioning it's got."
He shrugged. When you're the AC guy, you learn to deal with the heat whether
it's coming from an irate customer or the inside of your truck.
Customer friendly
He has dark shaggy hair and a droopy mustache and wears tinted shades.
This day, he's wearing a striped, short-sleeved shirt with the blue-and-white
Facilities Services patch sewed on the chest. And when he's not wearing a
smile, it's not because he's mad. He's probably just talking about his favorite
subject: his 14-year-old son, Joshua. They fish and hunt and camp and swim
together and go to the beach together and bounce around together in their two
four-wheelers. They work together, too, when need be. In the past few weeks,
the two of them re-shingled their roof.
"I ain't going to have him but one time," Conklin said. "He'll be growed up and
he'll be gone so I try to enjoy the time I have with him."
He speaks at a deliberate, almost laconic pace and rarely finishes a job
without finding a friend. It may not be in the job description to be so
friendly, but it's a part of his nature and part of the service that people
such as Saundra Thomas have come to expect from him. Thomas is a secretary for
the economics department in Gardner Hall, one of the dozens of buildings on
campus with an air conditioner in nearly every room.
Whenever one of those units goes bad, Conklin gets a call. And whenever there's
a call, there's usually a good conversation to be had, too, she said.
"He's a very congenial, very caring person and on this campus there are a lot
of people who don't care about their jobs the way he does. Steve just doesn't
come in and do the job and leave. He really cares that he's done a good job.
"And he seems to enjoy the people as much as the work," she said. "I don't
think he would be happy with a job that wasn't people-oriented. That's just not
him."
For the past 13 years, Harlan Mangum has been the facilities manager for the
chemistry department in Venable Hall. And in Venable, Mangum has had to deal
with more "physical plant people" than he can count. But Conklin is at the top
of the short list of people Mangum knows he can count on. "In Steven's case,
you don't just develop a relationship, you build a rapport," Mangum said. "He
is deliberate in the things that he does and he checks up on things and lets
you know about it, which is very good. A lot of times people won't tell you
they are finished. Steve will follow up and is just very thorough. He makes my
job easy."
Barbara Meadows, the department manager of Operations Research housed on the
second and third floors of Smith Hall, is another regular contact for Conklin.
"He knows his craft," Meadows said. "He knows what to do and he works extremely
hard to satisfy his customers. He's never been defeated. He's always figured
out something for us."
Life lessons
Forty-seven years of living have taught him a lot of lessons, Conklin
said. Some of those lessons came harder than others. Some of them he wished he
never had to learn.
When Joshua was about 3, Conklin was one of 46 employees laid off from Southern
Pride Car Wash in Burlington. Conklin had worked at the place six years, doing
everything from welding to running a drill press to doing electrical work on
the auto wash system.
Looking back, all he misses about the place are the people, he said.
"It ain't hard to find a job if you really want to work. And I like what I'm
doing now."
It was not long after he got his job at the power plant that he entered the
University's apprenticeship program to learn heating and air conditioning. At
about the same time he was going through the program he went through a
divorce.
"I was going to school, working, getting my little boy and making sure he was
in school, had baths, had his homework down. I was averaging probably four
hours of sleep."
His apprenticeship lasted four-and-a-half years, and during it, he floated from
shop to shop, one dealing with vacuum pumps and air compressors, another with
fan motors, another with pneumatic air controls, still another with fire alarms
and large motors.
In July of 1997, he earned an associate's degree in air conditioning, heating
and refrigeration mechanics from Alamance Community College, not far from his
home in Haw River.
The following year, he started working on the air-conditioning units in all the
student residence halls before switching over to his current job in late
August.
Conklin's supervisor, Gary Pearce, used to be the AC guy years ago. Everybody
takes a different approach to the same problems, Pearce said. Everybody starts
out getting the formal training they need, but it takes experience in the field
to really become a master at it.
There are 45 people associated with air conditioning and refrigeration in
Pearce's unit who take care of all kinds of different systems for all kinds of
different uses, Pearce said. Conklin, along with some 1,200 window air
conditioners, is responsible for 838 water coolers and 160 refrigerated air
dryers, devices that take the moisture out of air to preserve pneumatic
thermostats that run off air.
What makes Conklin stand out is that he understands there is more to his job
than fixing a metal box full of parts, Pearce said.
"If you take the job seriously, you are working for the customer and not just
working on a machine," Pearce said. "Steve knows a part of his job is to make
your job easier. He truly wants you to be comfortable."
Chilling out
This day started as most others do, in the bowels of Davie Hall, amid
the air ducts and water pipes and compressors and other gadgetry where Conklin
has set up a desk and a file cabinet for his paperwork and a locker for spare
parts. It may not be an office, but it's the next best thing. It is here where
he and his assistant, Todd Wagoner, usually take their 30-minute lunch break.
They even have a latch door cut in one of the air ducts that they can open to
"steal a little cool air."
As he pulled out of the back parking lot of Davie Hall, he ran into Andrea
Presler, the curator with the North Carolina Botanical Garden who cares for the
campus arboretum. "There's trouble," Presler yelled at him.
"What do you mean calling me trouble," Conklin yelled back. Both were
smiling.
"She picks on me," Conklin said after he drove away to his first assignment of
the day in Venable Hall.
Then again, a lot of people do. As Conklin sees it, all that picking-on makes
the day go by a little easier.
"Everybody picks on me and gives me a hard time," Conklin said. "I let it go,
you know. If they didn't pick on you they wouldn't like you. That's my way of
looking at it. It's cool. I can deal with it."
The big unit in Room 310 Venable, however, proved to be a different story.
Within the past week, Conklin came in to fix it and already it was blowing hot
air again.
He unscrewed the front panel and pulled the unit out from the tray and quickly
hooked up a voltage meter to test the compressor. The compressor kicked on as
loud as a freight train.
That's not good, Conklin said. He's never cut a compressor open to see what's
inside, but he's heard that sound enough times to know whatever is in there is
nearly shot.
Still, he's got it working for now, for this particular class on this
particular day. Or so he thought until he reattached the grill and turned it
back on. Within seconds, it flipped a breaker.
"I know what it is," Conklin mumbled. "The compressor's gone."
Two stops for the same unit and still it was blowing hot air. It can be
maddening if you let it get to you, Conklin said.
Every day is a series of judgment calls about what assignment to get to first.
It's easy to second-guess yourself, to wonder if you should have taken that
other service order ahead of the one you just did. You learn after a while to
let it go, Conklin said, to do as much as you can for as many people as you can
until you reach the end of the day.
In the basement of Venable is a storage closet full of replacement parts and
new units that Conklin will get to later in the day to see if there is a unit
of the right size and BTUs that he can load in his truck and haul up to Room
410. He will also look for another unit to replace the one that had broken down
in a basement office in Wing C of the Medical Building.
But out by the truck, Conklin was delayed by Rusty Nipper, a maintenance
mechanic in charge of plumbing at Kenan Stadium. Nipper needed a valve for a
water cooler inside Kenan and knew the side panel of Conklin's truck was the
first place he should look. "I called him one time and asked him where he got
them, talking about what supply house, and he said, `I got them off my truck,'"
Nipper said with a laugh.
Nipper and Conklin end up driving back to Davie Hall where Conklin pulled the
needed part out of his storage locker. It's all part of the deal, Conklin said.
You've got to treat the people you work with at least as well as the people
you're working for.
At midmorning, Conklin met his assistant, Wagoner, at the Venable Hall storage
closet to get the replacement unit for the Medical Building. At the Medical
Building, they hauled the unit on a dolly to the basement of Wing C where they
encountered Kathy Webster, a clinical administrative assistance.
Webster was also a past customer, she said, pointing to the portable air
conditioner that Conklin and Wagoner set up for her in the cubbyhole she has
for an office. The air conditioner had an air hose that Wagoner stuck through a
duct in the ceiling.
Webster said the window unit she had previously had been vented into an
interior wall. On the other side of the wall was the mechanical room filled
with "nasty air." Last summer, she had a choice between hot or foul air. "They
did that laser thing and it was over 100 in here," Webster said. But that was
before the portable arrived. She opened a little tray on the unit to show where
the condensed water goes. "I do have to empty it, but I don't mind," she said.
"They did me a good turn."
After they took the broken unit down the hall, Conklin pointed to the grass
covering the top. "This one is full of grass and it's done stopped the
condenser up. The heat can't dissipate off it and that's why it's not cooling
properly," Conklin said. "How these machines down through here have lasted at
all I don't know. I'd have to say it's a miracle of God."
Wagoner has worked with Conklin for about seven months now. A lot of what
Conklin has Wagoner do is preventive maintenance -- things like replacing air
filters that can get dirty and cause a unit to overheat. Wagoner said he plans
to go to technical school and enter the apprenticeship program that Conklin
completed. For now, Wagoner said, he is watching and learning.
Conklin carried a notepad filled with serial numbers and model numbers and the
number of BTUs for units he has worked on. The notebook is part of a system he
is creating to list each unit for each room for each building he covers.
Wagoner said that system is paying off in saved time. When they get a call in
for a repair, they know half of what they need to do before they arrive.
"He's 24, I'm 47, but yet we share a lot of the same interests in a lot of
things and we get along good," Conklin said. "He's easygoing."
"The more people you make happy the better your job gets in a lot of senses. I
tell Todd, `Talk to the people. That's what people want. Tell them what's going
on, don't tell them a bunch of lies.' He's catching on pretty good."
Wagoner said he has no complaints. "It's been good. He's trying to teach me to
keep up with all my stuff so I can cover my butt down the road. Write
everything down and it will help you out in the long run. It's been fun."
The secret to getting along with people is simply treating people right,
Conklin said.
In all his years on campus, he can't remember having a cross word with anybody
and he plans to keep it that way. "Why have it? I bend over and bite the dust
and say, `Hey, it's a job, do it whether you like it or not.' I'd rather do
that than hear the chin music from somebody saying, `He didn't do his job.' If
you do it, you don't have to worry about it."
Conklin is not sure whether he'll still be doing window units 10 years from
now, but he does expect to still be working at the University doing
something.
With an upgrade in classification, he could earn enough money at work to get
away with working less at home.
To stretch his salary, Conklin now mows 14 yards all over Burlington during the
summer and does wedding and portrait photography on the side. "You've got to
live and that's the best way I know how to put it," Conklin said of his other
work. "It's called `Survival' to me."
When his house was destroyed by fire in 1983, he helped tear it down. With the
new house, he did the wallpapering. Built the deck. Framed in the garage.
Within the past two months, he has rebuilt two engines, one for his car, the
other for his truck. "I'll put it like this: The next-door neighbor asked what
I can't do and I said, `I can't find a decent lady.'" He cracked up. "They are
hard to find -- believe me."
Conklin considers himself "single and looking" and made it clear he wouldn't
mind a bit if more people know it. "The boss man knows it already," he said.
The secret to a job is not much different than the secret to life, Conklin has
figured out. You've got to keep plugging away at it with patience.
"I try not to let things bother me. It could be worse. I could not be here. I
could be dead. So I just take one day at a time and enjoy life. People teach
you that a lot of times."
And whether you are hot or cold, you've got to learn to stay cool.
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