{"id":96,"date":"2008-01-14T15:38:08","date_gmt":"2008-01-14T21:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=96"},"modified":"2024-07-05T08:11:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-05T14:11:10","slug":"workplace-efficiency-plumbs-new-depths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/workplace-efficiency-plumbs-new-depths\/","title":{"rendered":"Workplace efficiency plumbs new depths"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wouldn’t exactly say I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I do like routine.\u00a0 I like to get to work at roughly the same time (give or take a couple of minutes) every day, and leave at the same time.\u00a0 I listen to the same radio station in the car, write with the same pen at work, and I like to have my breakfast, dinner, and tea at the same time, every day.\u00a0 One of the side-effects of this is that my – ahem – scatological requirements<\/em> are also pretty regular.\u00a0 That’s pretty<\/span> regular.\u00a0 Not dead-on-the-same-time regular.\u00a0 Which is why I find it highly suspicious that the cleaners just happen to want to clean our office restrooms every time I happen to be in there.<\/p>\n

Really.\u00a0 I’m not being paranoid.\u00a0 It’s every time.\u00a0 Without fail.\u00a0 No sooner do my cheeks meet the seat than there’s a knock on the door and someone is asking if they can come in and clean.\u00a0 At least I think that’s what she’s asking – it’s all in Spanish and my Spanish is limited to what I’ve picked up from Dora the Explorer<\/em> which doesn’t cover such niceties – she could<\/em> be asking if I wanted to take advantage of the complimentary arse-wiping service, for all I know…\u00a0 Anyway, it happens with such alarming regularity that I am beginning to think that it can’t be mere coincidence.\u00a0 The cleaner’s little cupboard (where she seems to spend all of the time she’s not hammering on the toilet door) is right next to the restroom, so she’s either drilled little ‘glory holes’ into the wall so she can see when I walk in, or she’s sat there with her ear pressed to the wall waiting for the sound of my pants hitting the floor, just so she can run round and interrupt me vacating my bowels, for her own sick amusement.<\/p>\n

I would just sit securely in my cubicle and let her clean the remainder of the restroom, but there’s about a couple of inches gap between the door and the cubicle walls, and I’m not really one for eye contact when I’m dropping the kids off at the pool.\u00a0 I don’t know why they’re like that here in the U.S., whereas in Belgium (where it’s not unusual in bars for the ladies’ to be through<\/em> the gents so they all get a good look at you standing at the urinal as they traipse through) the cubicle doors in the office restrooms were full floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall ones.\u00a0 Here, it’s like my old (boarding) school, where the doors only went halfway up.\u00a0 Although that was probably so the teachers could stroll past and see if they needed to get the canteen staff to add more bromide to the tea…<\/p>\n

Actually, it could all be a part of some new company policy to make sure the staff don’t waste too much time on the toilet.\u00a0 They’re all about efficiency and productivity here, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve now started to look into cutting back on ‘toilet-time’.\u00a0 I guess the cleaner is a fairly cost-effective measure: pay someone on minimum wage to go round and rattle the toilet doors two minutes after your highly-paid staff have gone in, and jolly them along a bit.\u00a0 In some cases, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.\u00a0 I worked with a guy once who seemed to have some kind of narcolepsy.\u00a0 After one too many cases of him falling asleep whilst someone was talking to him (really) he started napping in the toilets during the day.\u00a0 You’d walk into the restrooms and there’d be this loud snoring coming from one of the cubicles.\u00a0 I’d have to go in and kick the door before our team meetings, just to wake him up.<\/p>\n

But if it is an efficiency measure, why bother with the cleaner?\u00a0 Why not just automate the process?\u00a0 They could fit the cubicles with time-release doors like you get on those public toilets in London, where the door opens automatically after a certain amount of time, to stop the down-and-outs from using them as Japanese-style capsule hotels.\u00a0 And as an added incentive, they could mount a camera to the wall opposite the cubicle – after five minutes, the door springs open, and your photo is taken and instantly posted to the company Intranet in a kind of ‘name and shame’ policy.\u00a0 That’d<\/em> stop people sitting in there reading the newspaper for half an hour.<\/p>\n

Alright, maybe that’s a step too far (I hope…).\u00a0 But in a workplace where they have already limited the number of sick days you can take a year, I don’t think it is a huge leap to where they limit the amount of time you can spend on ‘non-company business’ during the working day.\u00a0 And it would be pretty easy to implement, too.\u00a0 In this office block, we have to badge in to and out of the building, so our employer knows how much time we have spent in the office. Why not fit the same badge locks onto the toilets, and then you can control how much time your employees are spending in the can.\u00a0 Set a limit of maybe 15 minutes a day, and if they go over that limit, the door won’t open when they try to badge in.\u00a0 Simple and effective.\u00a0 As an added bonus, coffee consumption would go down, providing cost savings there as well.\u00a0 Either that or the sale of Depends would go up…\u00a0 (Actually, I think they are standard attire in some telesales centers.\u00a0 At least the callers always sound to me as if they’re in a small amount of discomfort.)<\/p>\n

The alternative to all of this is to make sure that staff are still productive even when they are parked on the porcelain.\u00a0 Some of the staff here have wireless handsfree telephone headsets, so they can walk away from their desk (to the fax machine, the fileroom, and so on) whilst they’re still on the phone.\u00a0 The other day I saw one of them coming out of the restrooms with their headset on, mid-conversation<\/em>. So they must have been on the phone during their ‘comfort break’ (as the Americans like to euphemistically call it – although “taking a bio” [as in a ‘biologically necessitated break’] seems to be the new one).\u00a0 That must have been a pleasant call: “I’m giving your request my utmost consideration…(grunt)…I’m sending the report to you right now…(plop)…It should be with you shortly.\u00a0 Have a nice day!”.<\/p>\n

Or maybe they could just extend the ‘hot-desking’ concept to the restrooms.\u00a0 Fit a docking station to the back of the door, and everyone can take their laptops with them, and not waste a second.\u00a0 Or just give us the wireless network I’ve been asking for for the past several years.\u00a0 If it meant that I could move the mail without the sphincter-tightening suspense of anticipating the rap of some aged scraggit’s bony knuckles on the door at any moment, I’d vote for it…<\/p>\n

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I wouldn’t exactly say I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I do like routine.\u00a0 I like to get to work at roughly the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[73],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-work","tag-paranoia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1759,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/1759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}