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In the 1990s I worked in an office that felt like some kind of home for the dying and infirm. It was a gallery of itchy, bloodshot eyes, a chorus of croaks and sniffles and an open forum for melancholic disaffection. It was a kind of groaning, creaking and spectral edifice on an otherwise healthy commercial cityscape; my colleagues used to refer to it as the "haunted office". In short, it was a hotbed for industrial diseases such as dermatitis, asthma and tinnitus.
An office shouldn't be like that; certainly not a typical office . Yet, I've no doubt if the great god of health and safety had deigned to look down on it from his celestial microscope he would have discovered something resembling a laboratory culture of "industrial disease germs". At the level of us workers, blinded by proximity, as well as a haze of allergens and a rheumy atmosphere of airborne sneezes, it was hard to identify the causes of the office epidemic.
It seemed that the more we tried to address the problems, the worse they became. In alopecian despair, we hoovered and we sprayed, we sprayed and we scrubbed, we cleaned and we deep-cleaned; yet nothing, nothing got better. It remained like being in the epicentre of a collective hangover or the scene of the comedown from the drug-fuelled party from hell. My colleagues and I used to only half-joke that what the place needed was not a cleaner but an exorcist.
I now realise that we were probably only making things worse. In an attempt to eradicate dust and microscopic entomological demons we were only provoking added anaphylaxis. Toxic chemicals simply stripped back our resistance, and our skins, until we became an office of nightmarishly flayed-looking non-epidermal creatures.
Sick days became the bane of the business. It was not uncommon for our staff to be reduced from more than thirty to fewer than ten, leaving those who could make it in stranded, disconnected and functionless like the only survivors of terrible apocalyptic event.
I now know that there is a term for this type of workplace: "Sick Building Syndrome". The list of symptoms reads like a roll call of the nicknames of my former colleagues: headache, migraine, fatigue, poor concentration, red eyes, emphysema, rash, dermatitis, itching.
Eventually, I just had to get out. Productivity was low and I felt like I was on a hiding to nothing. My suspicions that the place was haunted and that it was not just the catastrophic coincidence of an illness-prone workforce behind the problem seemed to be confirmed when I finally managed to escape to the halcyon health of another job. It was like emerging from a rat-plagued dungeon into the regal surroundings above.
It is only now, working for a no win, no fee compensation claim company many years later, that I realize I was in an office that suffered from Sick Building Syndrome.