It was brown, it was sticky, it had to be chipped off with a screwdriver and it was coating the underside of all four arrow keys on my office keyboard. If it smelled like anything, the reek of the nail polish remover I was using to dissolve it thankfully disguised the smell.
Keyboards are dirtier than toilets, according to tests by a London consumer group. In fact, one of the keyboards studied was apparently so filthy, the microbiologist in attendance ordered it quarantined.
Somehow, I have a feeling my keyboard would fall under the quarantine-recommended category. I share my lunch with it, after all.
Question: why was I using precious editorial time, which under this company’s system has to be accounted for hour by hour, to clean a filthy keyboard?
I hope the answer is as simple as glue. Unfortunately, things seldom are. That horrible brown gunk, for example, may well turn out to be a melted, long-decayed tapioca pearl out of a cup of bubble tea I drank early last year. And my inclination to exercise personal keyboard hygiene, for example, may well turn out to be the result of my motivation having decayed long since.
It’s difficult to distinguish demotivation from burnout. The one can be the result of anything from office politics to the air conditioning not being cold enough on a 34.C day, and the other is generally the result of being motivated beyond one’s natural limits for too long. And either, of course, can result from the other.
I originally thought, to my disgust, that I was burned out – not entirely possible, because I’m quite sure my natural limits are a lot higher than that. Then I decided I was being lazy, which was more probable. And finally I settled on being demotivated, for a variety of reasons. I’ll start with the most simple one.
I was asked to do something which by all rights should have been given to someone else to do, for the reason of economy. This despite the fact that when my salary, qualifications and to date achievements are cross-referenced, I’m an economy deal in myself. I am not inclined to be understanding about budget limitations. Not when I’ve been sitting in an office where the air-conditioning broke down and wasn’t repaired for a week, and where one in fact still isn’t repaired, for reasons of economy. Sitting here right now – blogging at work, in open defiance of all decent work ethic – it’s warmer and stuffier at this desk than it is outside, and this on a day when the temperature is so high, the water coming out of the tap is hot enough to poach an egg in.
No, I’m not inclined to be understanding about budget limitations. I’ll do what I was asked to do, eventually, and do it reasonably well, and it might even be a success on the market. But I’m not going to be particularly happy about doing it. Things may be as simple as glue in keyboard hygiene, but when it comes to working life, they hardly ever are.
Quote running through head (translated from the Faye Wong track which took up a hefty amount of the last post):
“The departure is real and the person is artificial
There is nothing here to be attached to;
A hundred years ago I was not me and you were not you.”
If an office were reduced to its keyboards, the representation might be fairly accurate. Old, encrusted dirt hidden underneath the keys, dating back to the first person who used it on the first day it was installed, and affecting the function of the whole – making it dirtier, slower, stickier, increasingly less hygienic with every passing day. Turn it upside down, give it a good shake, and what falls out will be fairly representative of the office culture – all the habits, preferences, abilities and even the DNA of the people who’ve come and gone. Most of the habits revolving around eating lunch at the keyboard (thereby all the crumbs) not washing one’s hands much (thereby all the finger grime) and most of the preferences revolving around not knowing how, not being able to, not having the time to or plain not wanting to clean the damn keys.
Maybe they had a point. When I prised out the keys with a small screwdriver I found in a neighbouring desk, some of them flew off and landed in unlikely places. (Thank goodness my colleague in the next cubicle hadn’t come in yet; she might not have reacted well to a dislodged 9 key landing in her lap.)
Then again, if a workplace doesn’t clean up its act, the people there might fly off and land up in unlikely places too. Last last Saturday, the Straits Times ran a special feature report on Gen Y in the workplace. (I apparently count as Gen Y, since I know about all the technological features and practices Gen Y-ers are supposed to be infamous for, although I don’t exactly participate in most of them.)
There was a quote in this report: “They’ll come and ask you for time out for a vacation, and if you don’t give it they’ll quit and take the vacation anyway – then they’ll come back and work for your competitor.”
Slightly paraphrased, as I seldom remember the exact words – just the gist of them. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.
So what, exactly, is keeping me from demanding that vacation – and what is keeping me from taking it anyway?
I hope it’s as simple as glue.
Unfortunately, I know better. And I think I shan’t write about it here, because it might give away more than I’m willing to openly reveal.
Song running through head: 笑看人生 [Look on the Bright Side of Life?] by Sally Yeh.
