The Office Sanitation Nazi

There's a new sign taped to every mirror in every bathroom on every floor in our office building.


"Do not use the sinks to clean your nose."


Yep, the office sanitation nazi strikes again.

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No one knows who s/he is. No one has ever seen this person hang his or her notes on the bulletin boards, on breakroom walls, and other various public places.


But until last week, the bathrooms had apparently gone untouched - at least untouched by evil nose-pickers with snot encrusted fingers, that is...


Look, we all know what the poster meant by "Do not use the sinks to clean your nose" - s/he doesn't want people clearing their sinuses and spitting the mess into the sink. I can understand that; it's gross, and I don't want it in my sink either.


But should we call attention to this unpleasant reality?


Now that the sign is up there, others have begun wondering about whether the sinks are EVER truly sanitary - think about it: people go into the bathrooms to do their various bits of business, and inevitably, various bits get touched and... well, you get the picture.


And these after the business is concluded, people wash their hands. Meaning, they touch the sink with the hands that have just touched - well I'll leave it to your imagination here again...


And so, I have to wonder if the office sanitation nazi has thought this thing all the way through. Is this code thorough enough? Can we come up with a more stringent policy that covers all potential bathroom gross-nosity? Perhaps we should consider enacting the following Bathroom Sanitiation policy...

• All nose-picking is to be done on authorized breaks within authorized nose-picking zones. Please. No flicking.
• Do not handle your bits without a company-approved handling device.
• Do not use the company-approved handling device without wearing company-approved sanitary gloves.
• Do not touch the sink with the company-approved handling device, nor with the company-approved gloves you handled the company-approved handling device with. Use a new pair of company-approved gloves to touch the sink.
• Use a third pair of company-approved gloves to shut off the water when you have washed your hands (at least four times, as prescribed in the company-approved Sanitation Guidelines - now available encased in clear plastic for your convenience!)

Whether any of this will actually work in reality is beyond me - all I know is that these policies would probably send the sanitation nazi into previously unexplored realms of ecstasy...

as long as s/he cleans up afterwards, that is...

Yes, I'm a geek...

Let's hear it for Microsoft for creating SharePoint, the (mostly) easy to use and (fairly) well-designed database application that gives us analyst types a new way to manage information distribution to the masses...

I've been using SP for several months now, ever since my company (Cingular Wireless) officially adopted it for use by it's IT and Customer Service centers. As a senior analyst, I've been responsible for the development and maintainance of billing issues reports for several years now - it's a constant cycle of improve, refine, release, repeat - utilizing several regionalized Excel spreadsheets at first, then consolidating those down to a single Access database which fed a set of national reports.

But all of those tools were limited by the fact that they had to be produced by hand by myself and one or two other persons, then approved by management, and then held until a weekly release date. The system worked but it was wonky...

With SharePoint, I've been able to create a fully functional database that creates instant reporting based on data entry by all the members of our Billing Issues team. They enter the issues they are tracking, they are routed automatically to managers for approval - once approved, these issues display instantly within various reports based on different parameters - all with no intervention from me.

I really do love SharePoint - it's made all of our jobs a lot easier...

I am SUCH a geek.