2 July 2009
The office climate which pleases everyone is a bit like El Dorado, the legendary city of gold – no one has ever actually been there and as you get older you become more and more sceptical about whether or not it exists at all.
You come to suspect that even at Google, in heaven, in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory (insert your own fantasy workplace here) there are some people shivering like drug addicts, others irked and sweating, some with eyeballs drying out like Alex with his eyes taped open in
A Clockwork Orange, and others still who feel like some mischievous, incorporeal colleague has been assigned to stand behind them and blow down their neck.
Pleasing the cold-blooded reptile and the warm-blooded mammals, the ice man and the exile from the Tropics, Miss Asbestos-skin and Mr Butterfly Effect (who can feel the breeze on his face from a butterfly flapping its wings eight floors up) requires the dark arts of necromancy even on a normal day.
But when the weather goes Saharan, starts to go all 2050 on you, no Shamanism or voodoo or sorcery is gonna stop your colleagues from cursing your name. Perhaps at a time like this the only sensible thing for FMs to do is to find a really good hiding place – one where none of their flushed, sweating, underdressed colleagues will be able to find them. When all other efforts have failed there is no shame in clambering under your desk, putting your fingers in your ears and waiting for the storm to pass. It is called duck and cover, and has a long and distinguished heritage.
If you have too much self-respect for that (besides recommending some ego-pricking therapy) there are a couple of other things I can suggest that you try. Breakout igloos are destined, in my view, to be the next big thing. Flexible working from locations with famously powerful air conditioning systems would work: the cinema, for example, or the chiller aisles in supermarkets. A nude dress policy might work too (if you define “work” loosely enough). Another thing would be to send round an email citing fictional evidence on the health benefits of a broiling, febrile office. Tell people it is good for sexual stamina and life expectancy, and that it reduces the risk of heart disease. People will put up with almost any level of discomfort if they think it is good for them.
If you’re reading this blog with an increasingly frenzied desperation, on the look-out for real advice to satisfy the baying lynch-mob at your door, then here it is:
The TUC says that you should tell people that they can loosen their ties. Good old TUC. You can always rely on them for radical, blue-skies thinking.
Adam McNestrie
Users comments
Mr. McNestrie seems to treat the suffering borne by hard-woking office dwellers due to poor facilities management with contempt.
The summer heatwave is a serious issue, and in my office has caused co-wokers to shrivel into mummified husks of their former selves due to insuffcient air con - and these are normal people not 'Miss Asbestos-skin' as Mr. McNestrie flippantly dubs these poor souls.
I urge Mr. McNestrie to rethink his views on us poor peons sweating to oblivion under the yoke of incorrectly managed facilities.
Kronenbourg1664
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