Fiona McGarry is a freelance journalist and radio producer. Her radio documentaries have been funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) and the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund. She is a regular contributor to The Irish Times and The Irish Daily Mirror and happiest when well caffeinated in front of a good box set.
If you’re reading this at work, take a sneaky peak around. Go on, nobody’s looking. Now, count up all the stuff on your colleagues’ desks that really belongs in the kitchen or the bin – mugs, cups, cans, sandwich boxes, napkins, cutlery... you get the picture. Now for the gender analysis. I’m going to stick my neck out and guess that it’s the guys in the office that tend to, ahem, ‘collect’ the most clutter.
Scientists have researched the impact of working in tidy and untidy environments, but they haven’t gotten around, just yet, to looking at how gender enters the mix. We’ll have to stick with the anecdotal evidence. Have you come across the guy who is perfectly domesticated in his own home, but will let pizza boxes pile up around him at work in a cavalier, ‘my desk, my rules’ kind of way? Or the woman who runs her own home with military precision, but leads a double life as the office slob between the hours of 9 and 5?
The reality is that nobody has time to get too stressed out about office cleanliness. The likelihood is there’ll be a rota, forcing even the most reluctant colleague to occasionally ‘fill’ the dishwasher. Or your boss will spare you a world of pain (and cracked dishes) by hiring a professional cleaner, aka, the kitchen fairy. Rarely seen, s/he ensures that it doesn’t really matter if John from Accounts can’t shoot straight when he’s aiming for the bin, or the toilet bowl. The kitchen fairy is there to tidy everything up and to sweep a simmering gender battle under the carpet. But take it from one who knows, without the kitchen fairy, the mess can involve more than just a few bin bags.
In a radio station long ago and far away, there was a state-of-the-art kitchen. Not exactly Googlesque, but perfect for making porridge at 4am and ready meals at midnight.
When our cleaner took a week off, we had great intentions of drawing up a rota. In Paris, all hell was breaking loose and figuring out who should empty the bins didn’t seem like a priority. Within days the kitchen was in its very own state of emergency. Like the United Nations, everyone agreed that someone should do something. Nobody could figure out who. The girls in News thought it should be the guys in Sport and vice versa. The (female) Head of News got the rubber gloves out, but changed her mind when the (male) Head of Sport suggested she give his desk a quick once over too. Soon, the kitchen was a no-go area. Everyone was eating out. News and sport were barely speaking. On-air banter dried up. By Thursday, the atmosphere in the office was bitter and the place stank.
And then on Friday morning at 4am when the early shift shuffled in, something was different. The rubbish was bagged up, the dishwasher was sorted. It took a while to find out who bit the bullet. Turns out it was John in Accounts. His argument – always logical – was that the cleaner would need overtime to get the mess sorted. He didn’t have the budget, so decided to start the clear-up himself.
On the following Monday, normal service resumed. I’d like to say that we all learned a lesson and that the lads in sport finally did get to grips with the recycle bin. The reality isn’t as rose-tinted. But we all gave a bit more thought to the person who quietly made our working days easier and kept the domestic gender war out of the workplace.
So, if you have a kitchen fairy, be grateful for all the time they’ll save you, and use it wisely, for the big equality battles like equal pay and promotional opportunities. And remember, before you got home, to take those festering coffee cups back to the kitchen sink.
