At the office, in our break/lunch room up until recently we had a “jug” type water cooler. As in, it was a water cooler that took 5-gallon jugs of filtered/purified/whatever water. It had an electrical plug to the wall and both cooled (for cold water) and heated (for hot water.) Worked great. Our office went through about one 5-gallon jug per day. Deliveries of about seven 5-gallon jugs happened about once a week. Everyone was happy.
For reasons nobody knows (or will admit to), it was decided that an in-line filtering system would be better. So we showed up Monday to find our normal water cooler gone. In its place was a dispenser.
A quick look behind it, and it’s obvious what these clowns did. There’s cheap plastic tygon tubing that enters the thing. A hole has been drilled through the wall plaster, leading directly into…the men’s room. The filter, reservoir and housing for this system sit on the floor of the men’s room, beneath the sink. I actually took a camera-phone pic of the whole half-assed filter rig. It wasn’t hard to find an angle to get the the filter rig in the same frame as the men’s urinals. A co-worker sent it to HR and EHS saying, “WTF?! Any restaurant would be shut down for this!”
Half of us (the good half) are fairly disgusted and outraged. After all, even if it was a PERFECTLY sealed closed-system, they still have to open the whole mess up every couple of months to change the filters. And this particular men’s room floor ain’t exactly pristine.
Any ideas on what I should say to HR/EHS about this? Short of threatening, “I’ll get inspectors in here”?
I think it’s too late. You should just make out your wills and sit quietly at your desk, awaiting the inevitable, and hope it will be quick rather than long and agonizing.
Take a water sample to be tested. If it comes back clean then great, you don’t have to worry about the dirty bathroom floor contaminating the water. If it comes back dirty then you have a good case for going back to bottled water or at least moving the filter so it’s not on a bathroom floor.
This is easy: urinate on the filter and reservoir and then complain to HR. Unless you have blood in your urine, you’ll never get caught. And if you do get caught, you’ll have diagnosed a serious medical problem. Win-win.
The flaw in this installation is that only the dispenser in your area is getting filtered water; they should have put the thing at the central water pipe for the whole building.
The solution is to poach bottled water from another department. Assuming there is another department.
Enough of us went to management, screaming loudly. For all their faults, almost none of the managers wanted to support the “toilet water” initiative, so they all blamed it on the water company.
:rolleyes:
Supposedly it will be “remedied” in a week or so. I’ve been walking across the street for water in protest; I’ll keep doing it until they replace this filthy setup.
Our EHS supervisor actually called the health department, and they told him “Hell, NO!”
As in:
EHS manager: “So, we’ve got this water filtration system that employees are complaining about…”
HD: “Go on.”
EHS: “Um, it’s kinda in the men’s room?”
HD: “You mean like in toilets?!”
EHS: “Well, it’s not in the toilets, it’s just kinda next to them…”
HD: “No. NO!”
EHS: “They’re not really toilets! They’re just urinals!”
HD: “NO!”
EHS: “It’s a closed system! …most of the time. Except when they change the filter.”
HD: “FFS, NO!”
OK so I guess I’m that guy. I’m not getting the fuss. So what it comes from the bathroom? You don’t recoil in horror at using the water out of the sinks do you? OH GOD NO IT’S IN THE SAME ROOM THAT WE PEE IN. You’re probably the same kind of people that waste paper towels opening the bathroom door with them because it’s ‘ooky’. Personally I like the water jug setup myself, so enjoy it and remember that every single drop of water on the planet has been peed or pooped in at some point in history.
Yeah, I guess it doesn’t really bother me, either. I’d be glad it was moved (or is going to be moved) but I wouldn’t have been really vocal in either direction. Very few people have experienced genuinely dirty bathrooms or unclean water. Hint: it doesn’t really exist in the States.
