Janitor Talks to Reporter, Is Fired : Discipline: Answering a Times’ writer’s question precipitated his firing at Anaheim Plaza mall.

Aureliano Rodriguez was tending to his work as a janitor at Anaheim Plaza mall last week when he stopped to answer a question from a reporter.

His two-sentence response, which appeared the next day near the end of a Times Orange County Edition news story about the departure of a longtime tenant, cost him his job.

The 28-year-old Anaheim man, who at the time of his encounter with the reporter was hunting scraps of paper in the mall’s near-empty corridors, said Tuesday he was only being polite and wasn’t paying much attention when he made the observation: “Yeah, it’s always like this, pretty slow. I work the late shift and there’s not too much to do.”

But officials said Rodriguez’s response violated a policy that, according to mall regulations, is intended to promote “the positive attitude and excitement” of the failing shopping center and prohibits employees from communicating with “any news media.”

Rodriguez said when he arrived for work last Tuesday, he was handed a copy of the newspaper article with his comments highlighted and was asked to sign his termination notice. The janitor said he then told his supervisor that he wasn’t “paying any attention” when speaking with the reporter.

“I don’t understand these people,” Rodriguez said Tuesday of his former employers. “I did my job all the time. I liked my job. Now, I lose my benefits. I guess my luck is not good.”

While describing the individual violation as “minor,” Michael F. Strle, vice president of the plaza’s management firm, The O’Connor Group, said Rodriguez’s published response was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Strle said Rodriguez, a four-year employee, had been disciplined three times in the past six months for offenses that included talking to a woman while on duty, reporting for the wrong shift assignment and reporting late.

“It was an appropriate punishment for his work history,” Strle said. “Had this been his only violation, a letter would have gone into his personnel jacket and that would have been it.”

Strle said the information policy had been established just last year in an attempt to curtail the flow of “incorrect” information that had been circulating about the plaza in the past three or four years. During that time, the plaza had continued to see the departure of a number of merchants and a decline in shoppers.

Providing his disciplinary records to The Times, Rodriguez said the woman he was reprimanded for speaking to on June 17 was actually his wife, who had come to ask him for money to do some shopping at the mall for their child.

“It was maybe 30 seconds that I talked to her,” he said. “What am I supposed to do?”

The day he failed to arrive for the proper shift assignment was this past Memorial Day when, he said, he was not aware that his normal shift assignment of 3 to 11:30 p.m. had been changed to 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. On that day, the discipline record shows that he arrived for work at 2:57 p.m. and left at 10 p.m.

The mall’s action against Rodriguez has drawn the ire of Camille Awad, a local service station manager where the former janitor also works, and surprise from a shop owner in the mall who knows Rodriguez as a “reliable family man” who was “one of the better” mall janitors.

“He seemed like a nice guy, always friendly,” said Chuck Cooper, manager of the plaza’s Hickory Farms store. “He always seemed to be doing his job. He was always on the floor working.”

“He is a good man,” Awad said.