Retired security guard leave motivation notes in the company stairwell, making it his retirement mission to boost everyone's mood: 'Floor 6 had gotten me through some rough mornings'

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  • Office employee taking the stairs in the company building.
  • There are motivational sticky notes on every floor of my office stairwell and I just found out who's been leaving them
  • For context, I work on the 7th floor and I've been taking the stairs every day for about a year and a half. Started it as one of those
  • "small healthy habit" things and it just kind of stuck. The elevator in our building is also notoriously slow so it works out.
  • Sometime around last spring I started noticing little sticky notes on the wall at each landing. Like, every single floor had one. They
  • weren't anything crazy, just simple stuff like "you're already halfway there" on floor 4, or "almost, keep going" on floor 6.
  • Handwritten, slightly crooked, clearly not a corporate thing.
  • I assumed it was HR doing some wellness initiative. We'd had a few of those before, step challenges and that kind of stuff. I
  • mentioned it to a coworker once and she said she'd noticed them too and also assumed HR. We just kind of accepted it as background noise and
  • moved on. Last Tuesday I was running a bit late and took the stairs faster than usual. On the second floor landing I
  • almost walked straight into an older guy crouching down and carefully peeling off an old note to replace it with a fresh one. He had a
  • Kind elderly man descending a stairwell.
  • little stack of them in his hand, pre-written, sorted by floor. Turns out he's a retired security guard who worked
  • in the building for over twenty years. He still comes. in three mornings a week as a part time contractor. He told me he started
  • leaving the notes because "the stairwell felt sad and people looked tired." He said he writes them at home on Sunday evenings
  • while watching TV. He seemed a little embarased that I'd found out, like I'd caught him doing something silly. I told
  • him floor 6 had gotten me through some rough mornings. He just nodded and went back to carefully smoothing down the new note.
  • I've started taking the stairs even on days I really don't want to.
  • TLDR: Motivational sticky notes in my office stairwell turned out to be the work of a semi-retired security guard who writes them at home on Sundays because the stairwell "felt sad."

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