Nobody Wants to Do Maintenance

Seán, Father Time, and the Janitor’s Philosophy

24 January 2026 ~ 3 min read

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” That line, from his novel Hocus Pocus, is the engine of the entire Cosmic Janitor Trilogy.

I grew up around janitors. I worked alongside them in the summers—mopping floors, fixing what was broken, keeping things running so other people could do their jobs without thinking about the infrastructure holding it all together. What I learned from that work wasn’t glamorous, but it was essential: a good janitor doesn’t want credit. He just wants to do his job and not make anyone else’s job more difficult. That’s it. No ego, no ambition for power. Just quiet, steady maintenance of the things everyone else takes for granted.

That’s Seán O’Sullivan. A Cork pub singer who accidentally drops a cosmic tool through dimensions and gets conscripted into maintaining reality itself. He’s not chosen because he’s special. He’s chosen because he has the temperament—the willingness to show up, do the menial work, and care about things that nobody notices until they break. Seán doesn’t save the universe with a sword or a spell. He saves it the way a janitor saves a building: by fixing what’s broken before it becomes a crisis, one small repair at a time.

But “maintenance” in the Trilogy means more than mops and broken pipes. It means infrastructure—the systems that hold communities together. It means institutions. It means relationships, democracy, the planet itself. Everything that requires daily, unglamorous attention from people who will never be thanked for giving it. That’s what Vonnegut understood, and it’s what Seán learns across three books: the universe doesn’t need heroes. It needs janitors. People willing to maintain what’s already been built rather than tearing it down to build something with their name on it.

As a teacher, I think about this constantly. Teaching is maintenance. You’re not building monuments—you’re keeping the infrastructure of knowledge and curiosity alive for the next generation. It’s invisible work when it’s done well. That’s the janitor’s paradox: the better you do your job, the less anyone notices you did it.

Father Time, the Trilogy’s other Vonnegut-inspired character, carries that philosophy into the cosmic realm. He’s a doppelgänger for Kurt himself—wry, sad, deeply funny, quoting Vonnegut at moments when the wisdom cuts deepest. If Seán is the janitor doing the work, Father Time is the one who’s watched humanity long enough to understand why the work matters and why so few people volunteer for it.

I think Vonnegut would have adored Seán O’Sullivan. A man with a mop, no ambitions of grandeur, and a quiet conviction that showing up is the whole point. That’s not a flaw in the human character. That’s the fix.

— Liam