In 1964, the assistant housing manager of Wright Quadrangle offered Janet Tapp a part-time job in the dormitory’s office. She has been with IU ever since. On Oct. 21, she will celebrate 60 years working at the university.
An Indianapolis native, Tapp grew up in Bloomington after her parents moved south when she was seven to open a restaurant on Third Street and Eagleson Avenue called Tapp’s Chatterbox. Customers could get a plate lunch with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, applesauce, a bread roll and a drink for 85 cents, Tapp said.
“My parents fed a lot of kids that couldn’t afford to eat,” she said.
She said the restaurant was frequented by IU students and community members alike, as well as Wright Quad’s assistant housing manager, who ate at the restaurant every night for years.
Though Tapp has had six other jobs at IU since working part-time at Wright Quad, she’s never applied for a single one and was instead asked to take them.
When she began working her first job at IU, she made $1.38 an hour, which equates to about $14 in 2024 while enrollment was $11 per credit hour, she said. The next year, she took a job as an assistant assignment clerk for married housing, where she reviewed marriage and birth certificates for students with spouses and children.
After a bookkeeper developed Parkinson’s disease and took a brief hiatus, Tapp was asked to step in. It was a job she had a passion for since high school. By the time the employee returned, another employee in the payroll department had retired. Tapp was told to take over the role.
“I think I went home and cried probably the first three months because I had to know all the industry policies,” Tapp said. “Once I got into it, there really is such a satisfaction of knowing people are getting paid.”
Tapp was also elected to the staff council and served as chair and co-chair of the IU Fun Frolic, an annual carnival and fundraising event for Big Brothers, Big Sisters and IUB Early Childhood Education Services, which ran from 1957 to 2011. She recalled that each academic department ran its own game for the fair.
Tapp said she worked at a booth for the chemistry department, whose game was to have participants toss ping pong balls into glass beakers.
“I never got so tired of picking up ping pong balls,” Tapp said.
She said it eventually became difficult for the event to keep up participation, and Fun Frolic fizzled out.
In late 1975, Tapp became an administrative accounts clerk where she supervised payroll and bookkeeping. Then, in 1979, she became part of a personnel representative program in IU’s effort to improve communication with staff about faculty benefits.
Tapp said she felt there was a shift in morale on campus around that time.
She said it seemed that RIF-fing at the university made people more secretive regarding their jobs and less willing to share what they did for work, not wanting to be replaced. A RIF is a reduction in force, like a layoff, but usually a part of a plan to permanently close a job or department.
A human resource employee told Tapp the morale on campus had never been lower, Tapp recalled.
“It was a shame, but it honestly was, before then, a true family,” Tapp said. “It just seems like some of our jobs just don’t get the credit that they need, you know. And these, these hardworking people make very little.”
Tapp was nominated for a staff merit award in 1981, 1982, 1983 and 2022, but has yet to win. Staff merit awards are nominated by colleagues and supervisors who send in letters of recommendation.
“The letters that I received were worth more than the $1,000 that (the staff merit award) paid,” she said.
Tapp said her Halls of Residence department merged with the Residence Life department in 2000.
“This was the first time I was given an opportunity to change, to decide what job I wanted,” Tapp said. “I chose the payroll.”
She continued to work in payroll and is now the Assistant Director of Payroll under Auxiliary Business Services, despite there being no director of payroll.
Tapp’s current supervisor is Adam Hadley, the Executive Director of Financial Services and Operational Initiatives.
“Our employees expect to get paid accurately and timely, and she is very passionate about that,” Hadley said. “I mean, she’s mentioned that several times, that that’s really almost like a reward to her.”
Tapp leads a team of five other employees that Hadley said she’s worked closely with for a long time.
“Our department has basically a zero-error rate,” Tapp said. “And we process well over 3,500 pays biweekly.”
Her favorite memory of working at IU was when she worked in the Halls of Residence department, and she and the administrators would go out and mingle with the students during her lunch.
“If there was a project going on out in the dorm or something, we go to that dorm that day and see it,” she said.
Tapp said that over the years, technology has made the largest changes around campus, positive in some ways but a detriment in others. She said that before payroll went online, the department had a few days to do catch-up work after sorting through all the paper checks.
“Now, electronically, we go from one pay period to the next, just constantly,” Tapp said. “We’re all just totally deadline driven.”
She said an upside of technology incorporation on campus was that students no longer had to wait for hours in the Bill Garrett Fieldhouse, then called the Wildermuth Intramural Center, for class registration. Tapp said she usually worked in one of the bursar’s office booths to help during the enrollment week.
“They’d be sitting all over the floor in there, and they’d go sign up for a class, well it’d be closed, and then they’d have to go back and try to figure out what they were going to fill out,” Tapp said, “Some of them were there six, seven hours.”
Though her seven positions have had ups and downs, Tapp said she has thoroughly enjoyed them.
“I can honestly say during all of the bad times, there’s never been a day I haven’t looked forward to coming to this job,” Tapp said.
