Sick * * * * Work

Time flies by and soon another generation of ODIs will be on their way out into the big big world! And as always the new fellows have a million questions about life in South Africa and work at the Treasury. In the past I have always given very positive answers because, when compared with ODIs in other countries, the ODIs at the Treasury are truly quite spoilt!

The Ministry of Education in Rwanda does not have running water and no flush toilets; consequently the employees have developed a probably not surprising addiction to hand sanitizers. The Ministry of Finance in Lesotho does not trust their employees to use toilet paper efficiently and has decided to ration it – now every employee gets allocated one roll of toilet paper per week. The Ministry of Health in Swaziland has not managed to find their ODI a desk so that Jenny had to work from her window sill for a while. And in Tanzania the internet is so slow that fellows can go on a long lunch break in the time it takes to send one email!

Compared to this, the ODIs at the Treasury really have very little reason to complain: We have a nice bright office, big desks, our computers are all very modern and we have access to plenty of newspapers and magazines.

But recently things have started to change and are getting from bad to worse…

While most people are certainly sick of work and many have been sick at work, we at the Treasury are also in danger of being sick from work – quite literally!

I’ve always known that a work space is more unhygienic than a bathroom: A keyboard contains a lot more bacteria than a toilet bowl and a mobile phone can become 18 times more infested with bacteria than a toilet handle! So washing your hands after you’ve made a phone call may actually be more important than washing them after you’ve been to the bathroom!

So offices in general do not seem to be the most hygienic places, but our office has recently broken new records and would now probably fail any health inspection!


It started off with a sign in the kitchen kindly asking employees not to use the kitchen towels to blow their nose - Yuk! It turned out that one of my fellow employees must have thought that it made more sense to use the kitchen towel rather than one of the hundreds of paper towels! Yuk, yuk, yuk! The pure thought that my mug may have been dried with the towel that someone used to blow their nose makes me feel sick!

A couple of weeks later I walked back from the bathroom to my desk and suddenly spotted something on the floor! A big black bug – most likely a cockroach - was happily crawling through the office. Then a few days ago, our office manager sent round this email:

And today I opened the fridge and thought there was a funny smell coming out of it. I randomly checked the first container and almost threw up at the sight of its content: What once used to be Bulgarian yoghurt, had over time transformed into different life growing cultures, mould of various shapes, consistencies and patterns – a biologist would have thoroughly enjoyed inspecting the box! After making sure that other people got to enjoy the sight of it as well, I chucked it together with five other gone off products I found in the fridge!

So while working in the South African Treasury may have its benefits, I increasingly feel like it is turning into a threat to my health... definitely time to go on holiday!