There’s a word for people like Miranda Ard. Two of them actually.
“Miranda is a clean machine,” said David Synakiewicz, director of Environmental Services at St. Tammany Health System’s Covington hospital. “That’s the best way to describe her. If I could clone her, I would.”
Miranda, who has been putting her obsession with cleanliness to work at the health system for more than two years, smiled upon hearing that.
“I’ve been told that before, actually,” she said with a soft laugh. “The most fulfilling thing about my job is cleanliness. I love to clean, even at home. I’m pretty much OCD.”
That unflagging cleanliness sometimes prompts rolled eyes from the Franklinton resident’s five children. (“My kids tell me, ‘There’s nothing wrong with this house, Mama.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I’m going to reclean it anyway.’”) At work, though, it makes her a superstar.
As she mops the floor of the hospital’s newly expanded Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU, the nurses there greet her by name, part of what makes it one of her favorite places in the hospital. (That and the babies, of course.)
She also takes pride in cleaning the operating room where C-sections are done – and the idea that she gets to welcome new babies into the world by ensuring the room in which they’re born is clean, disinfected and safe.
When she’s not doing that, she’s cleaning the public areas of the hospital, including the hallways and lobby area of the hospital’s New Family Center. “That’s the first thing people see when they come in,” Miranda said.
With so much ground to cover, she, like others in the EVS Department, doesn’t have much time to rest. But she’s not complaining.
“I had been trying to get on at St. Tammany for years,” she said, adding, “I wanted a change and a little bit more stability.”
She rubs her fingers together while making that last point, a wordless acknowledgment of the hospital’s newly announced restructuring of pay for workers in certain departments, including EVS.
But pay isn’t everything.
“You get told how appreciated you are,” she said. “St. Tammany really is a nice place to work.”