Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Safety First?

Its quite crazy at my office at this time. The new building has been constructed and ready for occupation. All employees working at four different locations within the city are moving to the new building which is going to be our permanent workplace. Our group is one of the first to be moving. So much of preparation has been going on to make the move organized. Equipments, monitors, chairs, phones etc being tagged so that they reach the right desk. even trash bins have got a label with my name on it! Our company is very particular about Safety at the workplace. That is the first and foremost thing, being an oil industry and all. It applies to us too, eventhough we are at the corporate office and not at the site. Everyday we get emails from management about being safe during the move, blah blah blah.
Our tasks are to make sure the labels are stuck on all our equipment, clean out all the cupboards, trash/recycle all the tons of useless printouts we have accumulated over a period of time... and do all this with 'safety, foremost in our minds'.
Being a new employee, I took it all very seriously and started clearing out my shelves with zeal. Most of the stuff was left by different people who used to occupy that particular cubicle before me. But still I tried to clear out everything without complaining.
You know how these guys in these crime series collect forensic evidence and try to solve the crime, by profiling the criminal?. It was as exciting as that. As I delve deeper into those shelves I was slowly developing a profile of the person who was occupying that cube before me. It was like a psychological jigsaw puzzle, pieces falling into place.

Hmmm.. Lets see. Stapler pins, pens, pencils, sticky notes, notepads, business cards of random people - regular office stuff
whats this? bunch of electronic keys from various hotels. Must've been a consultant who travels a lot.

An used toothbrush. Interesting. Maybe he came in early to work or was obsessive about brushing after every meal..
Ha, he's got a few can's of tuna. Likes his fish.
Lots of little packs of ketchup from McDondalds. Loves his burgers/fries.
Oh! There's a little car which comes free with some McD stuff.

What else.. A box of plastic forks, spoons and knives. I could use that. Open the box. It was divided into three sections.
There are the knives. The spoons in the middle. no forks! Guess he used up all the forks. He's got more little packets of ketchup stuffed in this section? No wait. What the..? yikes!! They were little packets alright. But not ketchup. 20 or 30 of them. "Ultra ribbed for your pleasure"!!

This guy had taken safety at the work place too literally!!

Got on the internal IM communicator. Ping colleague.
Hey listen, who was occupying my cube before me?
She says, It was so-and-so.
Well, I found some weird stuff in here.
What? C****ms?
Yeah!! how d'you know?!!
ha ha! Must've been the property of so-and-so.
Wait let me call this-other-guy...

Before long, there was a bunch of people at my cubicle peering at the box and making funny remarks.
One guy who was still in touch with the owner of the said packets, took out his Blackberry and sent a mail to that unfortunate guy, CC'ed the whole bunch.
"Dude, we found your box of knives and forks. Drop by and collect them. :)"

We haven't heard from him yet.

That was a lot of fun, on a slow afternoon!! I still have two more shelves to go :)

1 comment:

Tys on Ice said...

man, wht do u guys do in ur offices?...condom!...iam really missing out on things here...

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