Gac Filipaj cleans bogs for a living. Not just any bogs, mind. Privileged bogs. Ivy-league bogs. Between the corridors and walls of one of the world's finest learning institutions he works a regular late shift, sweeping and cleaning until 11pm most nights. Occasionally he'll do 15 hours on the trot.
Privilege doesn't actually matter much in the world of public toilets. Filipaj might be surrounded by some of humanity's finest minds, but at his end everything looks the same. Dust is dust, brooms are brooms, bogs are bogs.
He's been doing it for a while, now. When the former Yugoslavia capitulated in the early 1990s Filipaj seized an opportunity to get out and move to New York City. He moved in with an uncle. He learned English. He got a gig as a restaurant busboy. And after a few years he took a job at Columbia University, as a subtly titled "heavy cleaner". Oh, the connotations.
Today, Filipaj saves money by not owning a cellphone. He doesn't own a TV, either. He bought a laptop for the first time last year. Before that, he wrote everything by hand. He lives in an apartment in the Bronx and commutes to Columbia for work. Twenty years since he left, he still saves and sends money home to his family in Montenegro.
It can't be much, you'd have thought. Especially not compared to the money America's biggest bank threw away this month. JP Morgan Chase publicly announced it had lost a cool US$2 billion ($2.6 billion) in a bad trade. The fallout continues and could cost it another billion by the time it dies down.
