When you walk into the office on a Monday morning and find that they’ve removed all of the bins, then you know that something is up. There was an email on Friday afternoon, but that got the Friday afternoon treatment and went straight into the bin.
Within two minutes of reaching my desk and fishing through my Outlook trash bin, I finally know why the other bins have been removed. We’re going on another recycling drive.
I don’t mind the recycling, in fact, I’m really up for doing my bit. The whole office went paper-free about a year ago and not only did we save a lot of trees, but we saved a tonne of money too. It took a bit of time to adjust to not just printing documents out and reading them on paper, but within weeks it was the norm.
So this new recycling drive shouldn’t have been too surprising. My only issue was the complete lack of bins in the whole office. There wasn’t a single anywhere out on the sales floor.
The kitchen area had received a poster make-over which Changing Rooms would have been horrified by. Five huge bins were now pride of place along one wall with a series of less than subtle posters, detailing exactly what could and couldn’t go into each.
I like recycling, I really do, but I also like not having to walk a minute around the office to the kitchen, just to put a piece of paper in the correct paper recycling bin.
I like not having to walk so much that I just made a rubbish pile at the end of my desk and added to it every time I should have walked around to the kitchen. In fact, I liked no walking so much, that I managed to accumulate my pile, not just from a morning’s worth of work, but from a whole day’s worth of work.
By the end of the day, I was not alone. The whole idea of having to walk to the kitchen, purely to throw a piece of paper in a bin, had not gone down well with the office. When you’re sat at your desk and you’re already feeling like there is not enough time in the day to simply do your job, you are much less inclined to waste time walking away from your work for any reason.
The whole recycling bin and trash mountain situation came to a head when our
absolutely lovely cleaners became trash pile removers. Just like us, they had real jobs to do. They had a whole office to keep looking presentable to our customers and we were not making it easy for them.
The moral of the story is that the normal bins returned. The sales staff were able to keep working at their desks and not being forced to hike to the kitchen. The cleaning staff were able to make our office look stunning again and we all just put our paper into our own recycling bins.
Everyone can play a part when it comes to keeping an office clean and tidy each day. From time to time the office will need a deep cleanse and there are cleaning specialists who can provide services to ensure the workplace is kept in the best condition.