Bringing a Vacuum to Work

After months of dust covering and growing on nearly all untouched surfaces, I finally brought my vacuum from home to clean up the studio where I work.

Wait, Travis, the radio stations are located on top of a hotel.  Where's their staff?

We do have hotel cleaning personnel empty the garbage cans and clean the bathroom and yes, vacuum the carpets.  Yet whether by discretion or instruction, they avoid any cleaning around the electronic equipment and boards.  Can't blame them at all.  If one somehow knocks the station off the air, they would feel responsible.

So I spent thirty minutes of the workday sucking up the dust from keyboards and countertops, behind monitors and from CPU air intake vents.

Side note: sweeping a vacuum over a keyboard has the same effect on a computer as a kitten walking over it.

Here's the question for employees at a job site: if an established cleaning crew is not responsible for a particular task, who is?  Seems the obvious answer are the employees, right?  And if that is so, then shouldn't the workplace have the necessary tools for any employee can do said task?  Seems the obvious answer is yes.

So if the two answers to the two questions are valid, then any business really needs to invest in a vacuum cleaner, and dustcloths, and a washcloth or two, and any other tools to satisfy the needs.

An Experiment with my Coworkers

While removing the dust, a curious question came to mind: if I left the vacuum here for the rest of the day, and informed the staff of its availability, how many would use it?  So I have done just that.  Let's see how many take the offer.

The next day I learned that nobody did. The morning after I asked again and still nobody did.

Everybody may be right and I am in the wrong.  I had very gently vacuum some circuitry and may have created a soft buzz in the live audio by so slightly moving a wire.

Canned air, that's what we need, canned air.

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