DON'T SIT THERE

Watch out there’s a Humphrey about!  Retro drinking up times are not the only thing making a come back.  Remember those 1970s Unigate adverts featuring mysterious red and white straw-like burglars sneaking through the air to slurp up your pinta? They’ve either invaded our office or the maintenance man has had a psychotic episode with the gaffer gun.  There’s red and white tape everywhere!

Health and safety’s reached epidemic proportions in the workplace to the extent I thought our office had been redecorated overnight then realised the reason I couldn’t see the wall colour was due to another over-explosion of pandemic posters.  At this rate we’re going to need a bigger office just to display all the Covid rules that have become part of the new normal work regime. 

Shut the toilet lid, wash hands with soap, use hand towels to open the doors, drop them into a special bin, don’t touch the light switches, blah, blah, blah.  There are now so many things to comply with in the toilets alone that it would be easier to wear Pampers than go for a wee at work.  Packets of wet wipes the size of breeze blocks now outnumber the canteen tables and I could fill a paddling pool with the amount of hand sanitizer sloshing about.  It’s nuts.

What’s crazier is that despite all this safety advice, no-one is wearing face masks indoors because it seems the powers-that-be think that laminated posters and gaffer tape are all you need to keep staff safe. Great if you are thinking of using these materials to build yourself a man-made laminated bacterial containment shelter to sit in during the 9 to 5 but it’s hardly going to deter a virus that’s set its sights on making you it’s next holiday home.   

It might have made more of a safety impact to buy us all plastic face shields or segregate office desks with see-through dividers than bombard the place with posters that no-one ever reads because let’s face it, when you’re at work the only thing you look at all day long is the clock in the bottom corner of your PC screen to see how nearer it is to home time. Office posters?   Nah!

As I’ve always wanted to go to work shitfaced, I’ve prepared my own protective facemask ready for when the next set of pandemic work-place rules are introduced.

Getting shitfaced