Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

It has been proven: offices are the breeding ground for an unusually high amount of bacteria and viruses — and our office didn’t need some expensive laboratory testing to discover this.

Instead, empty seats dot the rows in the office, the uniformity being disrupted in a random few seats by humans whom had either just gotten back from a terrible flu from someone, or were just starting to come down with that same flu.

And the effect is felt not only from the colder-than-usual air-conditioning (which I suspect was a contributing factor), but the fact that callers who made repeat calls are more likely to get picked up by the same agent. It gets embarressing when the customer actually remembers you and says, “We talked 2 hours ago, remember?” when all you can do is to ask for his identification number as if he called you for the very first time.

I know, it happened to me. There is this expectancy that customer service officers would remember them from the first call, where in reality so many other calls have gone by that the first customer would have been forgotten completely. Couple this with a flu-ridden mind, and you can see the potential disaster.

I know that somebody put in a request for an air-cleaner to be installed on site, but with the size of the room, any home-appliance-sized machine will struggle to even recycle the air to make a difference to the air quality. My teachers were smarter in this regard. They solved the problem back when I was still in school by turning off the air-conditioning and opened the windows.

A recent discovery was that computers are also hot-beds for virus and bacteria to breed in. Blame it on our own habitual obsession of eating at the desk. The minute food stains the keyboard and allows bacteria to grow rapidly, so much so that some people actually have declared a toilet bowl to be cleaner than the average keyboard! To think I actually dared to pick up snacks with my bare hands after typing on the it!

I really hope that they would do something about turning the air-conditioning on full blast during weekends; my last Sunday was extremely unbearable. For an asian having lived in the natural habitat of the tropics, the air-conditioning was artic to my hands, which could barely move in the cold. I seriously considered wearing gloves, but decided not to because it affects my typing. However, if things continue as they are, I might resort to getting those heater packs found in the army market. It isn’t common in Singapore to need a heater pack to work, but in this case, I consider it essential to even function in the cold.

In case you were wondering why I am ranting about the office environment, let’s just say that I fell sick. Being the good person that I was, I deprived myself of a day’s income by staying at home today. Anything for the health of my colleagues!

Filed under: General