Clear Your Desk

‘HERE at Anorak Towers, lunch is for wimps - well, lunch without a bottle of vodka is, at any rate.

‘I love a man who can clear his desk’

For others, lunch is a chance to drop crumbs from your sandwich into your computer keyboard and spill an energy drink over your work.

More and more office workers eat lunch at their desks. And while that’s good for the employers, it’s not so great for your health.

The Times has seen a report by Connections, a Manchester recruitment firm, which suggests that office workers would be better off eating their lunch in the toilet – where it’s cleaner.

A poll of 500 office drones found that only one on in 10 bothered to clean their desks, computer keyboards and telephones twice a year.

What the rest do is not revealed, but the inference is that they allow their desks to fester under the detritus of hastily-eaten lunches and nose and ear pickings.

And this is not good. Connections points to a recent US report that showed how the typical office desk is home to 400 times more disease-causing organisms than a toilet seat.

Describing its findings as “horrifying”, Connections blamed the increased levels of office filth on employers who have cut costs by no longer hiring professional cleaning services.

Which means that workers must clean their own desks. So make sure you clean yours - especially if you work at the FA and are thinking about getting naked on it…’

Posted: 11th, August 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink