As an employer it is important to have a safe working environment, it would be most unfortunate if a falling brick were to take out one of your HR or payroll people on their way back from lunch. I cannot imagine all of the small things that I have always taken for granted as a person that must be managed by my employer. However, I was in a project building once were our manager came to us and said that there would be a room inspection next week. The preliminary inspection by his boss did come up with a relatively short list of infractions that would need to be corrected.
One thing was the coffee maker. You cannot have a coffee maker, well actually any appliance that is plugged in that is not gone through the approval process. I later heard this was a gross simplification but that isn’t so important. The coffee maker was more than three years old, no one was using because it made terrible coffee. We had to make sure that our desks had at least three feet and 3.37 inches clearance between our desk and the wall or cabinet and there could be no wires underneath our desks.
The wires that he was referring to were networking wires and power wires. Obviously our equipment still needed all of these wires but they needed to be tied up and put into the cable holders. There was a rational for this. You might hear the fire alarm and while standing up you get your feet tangled in the wires where I guess you fall and hit your head on the wall or cabinet and get burned up.
Well, none of us wanted to get burned up in a fire while unconscious so we stopped our development and support (fortunately there were no production issues at that time) and the three of us spent a couple of hours partially disassembling our work environment and stuffing all the cables where they needed to go. It wasn’t a full man day, but this seems a bit ridiculous to have external people working on the internal infrastructure.
Unknown to us, and unknown to our manager the next week somebody from maintenance stopped by to make sure all of our wires were up to spec. The inspectors? Well, it was three guys, who spent perhaps 10 seconds in our room and it is not even clear to us if they bent down long enough to see under our desks.