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Cleaning the office coffee pots
Are you being asked to do more with less? Is your department stretched so thin, your workday now includes duties beneath your accomplished resume? Take a seat on the couch. Let's discuss.
Our new Department of Behavioral Economics is delving into the psychology of the new difficult choices we face.
In the first installment, Marketplace Senior editor Paddy Hirsch must decide whether to stand up and fight the indignity of cleaning the office coffee pots or sink to bribery. The undercover economist explains:
Did Paddy make the right choice?
And if you're facing your own office dilemma, I'd love to hear it...
At our office, if you make coffee, you have to clean the pot (or not) first. The task falls to the person who arrives at the office first.
I avoid this onerous task by not being first in. But what about that second pot? To avoid having to make coffee, I did it once. And I did it poorly. The coffee was too strong and I feigned compete satisfaction "ooo, just the way I like it." This caused my co-workers to announce that I was forbidden to make coffee ever again. Which of course gets me off the hook for cleaning the pot as well.
I learned this technique the hard way. When I first got married I cleaned a toilet much too well and now that's my job at home. I made sure to ruin some clothes and botch up the dusting, so bathrooms remain my only task. But I took the lesson to heart.
It's that old adage, stick to your knitting. Your brand should be known for excellence, but no brand can be excellent at everything.
"Brand" was the very first thing that came to mind before even watching the vid. While you'd have to give Paddy kudos for stepping up to the plate, it would seriously diminish his image/brand/reputation, etc.
The right thing to do is for Paddy to step up to the plate, call a meeting, and split the responsibilities evenly (i.e. everyone). Make the responsibility something fun, have competitions to see who can be the cleanest, who's the most creative at stacking the coffee cups and so on.
Now, the real question... What's it say about Paddy's image throwing out wads of money when staff have been downsized/let go, hypothetically speaking.
:)
