The Grim Reaper of Thurrock

I have never worked in the environment and amongst the culture and politics that can so often be found in a large office.

The closest that I have been to such a workplace was a few years ago when I was part of a team brought in to try to fathom out why the multi storey block that housed an entire administrative operation for a District Council to the east of London was being blamed by its staff as the source of health problems, poor morale, low productivity and general unhappiness but only when they were in the building.

It was a case of perfectly normal metabolism and function when within 50 feet of the electrically assisted entrance doors either arriving or leaving but with the personnel having an all pervading sense of doom and foreboding as soon as the threshold was crossed. Our team, self professed experts in the assessment of Sick Building Syndrome descended on that part of Essex.

A good few hundred people worked there in an open plan setting on each floor performing duties covering all departments of a Unitary Authority from accounts to housing services, welfare and social work, trading standards, food hygiene and education.

I had been given access to all areas to take readings of carbon dioxide levels, extract samples of dust and to carry out random interviews of staff members who were requested to answer a range of questions designed to compliment the scientific investigation.

It was through two eight hour visits on consecutive days that I got to see and experience what bored staff get up to when performing their apparently mundane roles.

The building was like a cross section through the average suburban town with the executive officers on the top floor, a descending order of superiority and self importance per floor below and with those who had the misfortune to deal with the general public firmly trapped at street level.

Each floor had its own hierarchy and structure and this was no more evident than on the staff notice boards which occupied prominent positions in the rest areas.

Out of the office there was obviously a very active social scene.

Quite complex graphs, charts and tables, upon closer inspection, related to inter departmental leagues for everything from darts and pool to ten pin bowling and squash.

Hand made A4 sheet posters announced clubs and societies for knitting, drama and opera groups,  book clubs, dog walking services and the choir.

As I loitered around the open plan areas with my monitoring equipment there was a regular traffic to and from the notice boards with frantic scribbling of information for personal reference or amendments to the status of the competitions.

In fact, maintaining the contents of the notice board did appear to be the primary purpose and activity of the majority of the staff members rather than strict adherence to any actual formal job description. This did, to my mind, partly explain why any enquiries to a Council Department in my home area took such an age to be addressed.

In the lower corner of one notice board, buried beneath fairly innocuous announcements of garage sales and miscellaneous sales or wanted items was evidence of a long running and very popular competition which initially shocked me.

There is no more a politically correct environment than in a Local Authority building. Staff are referred to as 'colleagues' or 'co-workers'. There is an all pervading quest to remove any potential or hint of prejudice or favouritism. There is no judgement on the grounds of race, religion ,gender or sexual orientation. However, the competition in question was boldly headed 'The Death List' and was over subscribed with 'colleague' names hand written each against the names of one solitary famous person.

The figures listed were from the world of music, the arts, politics and sport. All were of a certain advanced age and after an initial curiosity to identify a common theme I went cold upon the realisation that, yes indeed, the P.C sensitivities of the masses had been wholly abandoned in a bid to be the first to predict the death of an individual celebrity.

The list had no current acknowledgements of an actual winner or should it be loser, I'm not entirely sure.

I can only think that it had been a mild winter and that the oldest on the list had benefitted from the recent campaign for flu jabs or could afford the best private physicians. Granted, there were some strong contenders from my knowledge, albeit limited to gossip type magazines and reports in the press on the health scares of notable persons.

After working my way through the list I was surprised to find out that a number of the candidates on the list were actually still alive when I had thought them long since dead.

In the remaining period of my attendance at the building I remained on alert in full expectation of a shout and whoop of delight from a solitary voice amongst the overwhelmingly dour and depressed workforce upon first news of chronic ill health and poor prognosis for recovery for their particular entry on the list. I began to question whether it was the actually the occupants who were sick and not down to any syndrome of the building itself.