Santa Monica Office Cleaning: Because Janice Sneezed

You all know Janice. She’s the hardcore, type-A redhead in Accounting who never misses a day of work, even when her node is so plucked up she cad barley talk at all. And this is the story of what happened when Janice sneezed. It happened on Friday morning at your company’s Santa Monica office. Cleaning crews could have been scheduled to come in over the weekend and this never would have happened, but they weren’t. Instead…

Janice’s sneeze blew several billion haemophilus influenzae bacteria into the air just inside the break room door, where the ventilation system mercifully sucked about two billion of them up, and because the HEPA filter had been recently replaced, they stayed far away from human bodies. The other five or so billion spread rapidly through the room on the air currents caused by Janice walking promptly through her own invisible sneeze cloud. She re-inhaled a quarter-billion, and about four billion settled on the floor where they did no harm.

But of the three-quarters-of-a-billion that landed on tables, chairs, and Dan’s half-eaten submarine sandwich, a good 20% were lucky enough to get picked up by people’s hands as they pushed in their chairs, grabbed their papers, and so on. And the 5% that made it into the fridge when Dan put his sandwich (unwrapped!) back on the top shelf, well, they were the luckiest of all.

See, the employees whose hands got Janice’s sneeze-germs on them mostly washed their hands before they rubbed their eyes, picked their nose, or licked their fingertip to better separate two annoying papers. Only three of them caught Janice’s flu in those moments.

But over the weekend, the cold of the fridge slowed down the haemophilius influenzae — but it didn’t stop them. The moisture in Dan’s sandwich helped them thrive, and come Monday, when Sally knocked Dan’s sandwich over and bits of bacteria-laden mayonnaise and pickle juice splashed all over the paper bags and Tupperware below, the entire Marketing department was taken down for three days straight.

Moreover, the small water spill that Mark left on one table and the small coffee spell that absolutely everyone left on the counter next to the sink operated as breeding grounds over the weekend as well — and while the water only affected Jeff, the coffee knocked out about a quarter of the office at random.

Don’t let Janice’s sneeze blow up your Santa Monica office — cleaning is a low-effort, high-yield activity, and if you can’t get organized enough to do it yourself, hire someone who will!