Durrett first switched to dry work because he was sensitive to the chemicals involved in clearing bathrooms.

"I would have to breathe this horrible mist in and out all day long," Durrett says. "I also hated the way that my hands were always wet, my gloves would get sticky and the bathrooms would become uncomfortably hot because of the steam."

After he shifted to the dry side, Durrett discovered its social benefits.

"Now that I do dry work, I get to work with another person on the job," he says. "We eat breakfast together every morning and talk as we do our work or take out the trash."

Whether it is dry or wet work, dorm crew offers physical benefits desk jobs just cannot provide. While standing at a photocopier is hard on the back and knees, dorm crew workers are on their knees, scrubbing away.

"Forget about going to the gym," Sunderson says. "All you need to do for a good workout is to join the dorm crew."

"From lugging buckets up stairs to scrubbing the tiles of showers, wet and dry work is a very demanding job," Matthews says.

Dorm crew, even the dry side, is certainly not as dry as a desk job. Workers say exposure to a wide variety of undergraduate bathrooms has given them some lessons in life.

Matthews says that she has had quite a few "interesting experiences" cleaning guys' bathrooms.

"It's just funny to see how many guys actually use apricot facial scrub," she says. "And I also never knew how popular Noxzema products were with males before I did wet work. The other thing that I remember about cleaning guys' bathrooms was the large number of Playboy magazines strewn all over the place."

According to Matthews, cleaning bathrooms taught her that particular suites reflect the people living in them.

"Girls just have more stuff cluttering their bathrooms and guys are generally messier," she says. "But across the board, the worst by far are the seniors."

Except, perhaps, those seniors who have worked dorm crew themselves. Jason S. Cassidy '98 had a prolific dorm crew career, culminating his four year career with a stint as head captain. After cleaning up at Harvard, Cassidy went straight from four years of dorm crew to Wall Street and Salomon Smith Barney.

"I learned leadership through dorm crew in a trial and error process," he says. "Though I didn't know about leading people to complete a task at first, I learned how as time went on."

Cassidy says dorm crew gave him a rare opportunity to learn job skills useful after Harvard. "Because the deadlines for dorm crew are different than due dates for papers, dorm crew is much closer to the real world," he says.

The job experience of dorm crew gave Cassidy the skills that many students seek from their extracurriculars--but he got his at $8.50 per hour.