Sick Building Syndrome
Some buildings just make you ill. It’s a combination (which I have often experienced at work) of poor physical design, presumably knocked up by a blind person who has never been forced to spend hours of their life restricted to a 2 ft square cubicle with grey dividers, lack of natural light, poor air quality, lack of visual and aural stimulation, and frequently, dismal colleagues.
This one in Singapore (I better not say whose it is!) is a classic. It’s 30 degrees outside with blue skies. I know this because the BBC weather page tells me so. Although only seated 20 feet away from an enormous floor-to-ceiling window, some sunlight fascist has coated it with pimpmobile style tinting so that the omnipresent striplights, which wouldn’t be out of place in Abu Ghraib, are the only means of lighting. Add to that the air temperature, which, not to replicate my earlier rant, I will just say necessitates me wearing a suit and jumper, and has left my toes (unclad) with a blueish tinge.
To brighten up the office, someone has painted random walls in neon colours, and called the offices comforting names like “Forest Breeze” and “Mountain Stream”. There is a coffee machine, but we are only a lowly supplier, and my colleagues have been accosted when walking away with a small paper cup of nasty Nescafe, on the basis that we are neither proper employees of this organisation, neither are we guests. This apparently also means that we should have no need of any form of hydration.
I’ve worked in this office for a day and a half and already my throat is sore, my sinuses are screwed, I have a persistent throbbing in my temples and my eyes hurt. And I’m getting quite thirsty.
On the plus side, there is at least a democracy to the misery here. No-one appears to have lovely offices or superior cubicles. At SCB you had to rank significantly in the hierarchy to be within any distance of a window such that light would actually reach your desk – suffice to that that we in HR were reduced to moving around with lighted brands, like extras out of Lost.
At Unilever House, there were memos still is existence laying out the specific office requirements of different grades, including % of office to be covered in carpet and whether you were allowed 1, 2 or 3 photoframes. At the peak of your corporate career you would eagerly expect the arrival of the hatstand, which would prove to your envious colleagues that 30 years of Machiavellian machinations and back-stabbing had finally paid off.
I hate corporate offices so much that in the past I have found myself walking (slowly) towards them from the tube desperately dredging my mind for ways to try and appreciate my position so that I didn’t just turn and run home – at SCB I decided that at least I was better off than my great-grandad who was a miner and died of TB. Which probably says more about the morbid way my mind works than anything else, though it also says quite a lot about just how much I hated working at SCB.
If only I’d been a software programmer in the late 90s in San Francisco – then I could have spent my days thinking strategically whilst bouncing around the office on a space-hopper and playing the trombone. This is how it would be in my own company. There would be no need for motivational meeting room names as I wouldn’t be seeking the suck out the souls of everyone who worked there, or systematically root out any element of originality or flair from their personalities.
Rant over, I’m off to steal some coffee.
Jo 31 January 2007
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Hi,
Fascinating site, I like the Singapore Diaries. Good title for a book, arent you leaving yourself open to have your best rants plundered by all and sundry?
Malcolm Oldham # Jan 31