Taking away the berries

Taking away the berries

I sometimes write the beginnings of posts but don't post them. I still save them in case conditions change or other things happen and make me want to follow up on the topic. In this case, I wrote something about offices before the whole COVID lockdown thing happened and people largely stopped going to offices every day. With that in mind, let's proceed.

Offices tend to have break rooms. If you're lucky, it'll have a clean source of water and a safe place to stash your bagged lunch. If you're of the coffee-drinking persuasion, then maybe it'll have a coffee pot that's kept somewhat clean and never violated by really evil disgruntled people. There might even be a place to sit down for a while if you normally stand all day, or walk around if you normally sit.

However, tech companies decided to go past this at some point and brought about this whole notion of "microkitchens". This is where they'd put their branding on the coolers (instead of "Coca-Cola" or "Pepsi") and would load it up with every kind of fizzy sugary liquid they could get their hands on. They'd have racks and racks of shelving packed with all sorts of interesting crunchy, sugary and carb-loaded snacks. They'd also have professional coffee and espresso machines so that people could serenade the whole office with their steaming skills.

Invariably, conditions change, and the company wants to recoup some of the dollars they are spending on this stuff. Some of the micro kitchens go away and others shrink, and people complain. I certainly did... the first time it happened. They had claimed that those benefits were part of my salary and are why they offered me what they did. I wrote about this a few years later, and was taken to task for it by the Internet.

By the time my next Big Tech job happened, I had no delusions about the food situation. It would be there for a while, and then it would shrink, and indeed, over the next four and a half years, it did in fact do exactly that. I just smiled at the people who were going through it for the first time.

Every single thing that happened at company G then happened at company F. It just took a while, and didn't always happen in the same order.

Long after that, I foolishly signed up to do this sort of thing again, but this time I had planned to handle these things myself. People would occasionally rope me into having lunch on site, but I tried to get OUT of the office as much as possible. This company's office was in the middle of a real (if troubled) big city and was therefore walkable to a great many things. I could get pizza, fried chicken, a bar burger, soup and a salad with a cookie, another kind of pizza, soul food... all on foot. There was also a Philz Coffee right across the street for those afternoons when things really sucked and I just wanted to get away for a while and recharge before trying again.

So, what did I write back in 2019, while in that gig, then? This:

The best time to take away the free berries in the break room (or free sodas, or snacks, or candy, or kombucha on tap, or ...) is yesterday. This is always true.

The sooner you take it away, the sooner it will "age out" of the company history, and go from a sore point, to a joke (the "no-berry" all-hands meeting room), to a legend ("why is it named that?"), and then finally "those people were just entitled and stupid".

This is because most of the people who were around for it leave, and many more people join. Look at the average tenure of the employees in your company to get an idea of what the "half-life" is for the population. The people don't miss it because they never had it in the first place.

So, my take on kitchens and break rooms? Have fresh water available, preferably both cold and not-cold (not necessarily hot).

Pay your employees enough so they can buy snacks and not feel bad about it. Don't put your company in a f'in mud flat so they can actually LEAVE THE OFFICE to spend that money... on snacks. Or lunch. Or coffee.

Don't pack employees in so tightly that you can't drive away for lunch because there will be nowhere to park when you return.

Appreciate the fact that giving them a chance to shift gears may just bring the kinds of fresh perspectives you're not going to get from having wage slaves who don't leave the building once in nine hours.

Of course, if you WANT assembly-line workers who just glue things together and don't build lovely things or solve hard problems by using their innate tool-using capacity they have as healthy, happy people, then don't do any of what I said. Instead, build the hell out of those mud flats and keep 'em locked up all day long, then take away the stuff when they don't act appreciative.

Before long, you'll have washed out anyone who cares about that kind of thing and will be left with the nice, sort of "grey goo" that can be molded to do whatever you want, you lovely little sociopath, you.

Have fun with that.