The dignity of offices

The true honour of any office relies deeply not on visitors entering it with dignity, but on the owner of the office keeping the office’s dignity. Every office has its dignity; and every ‘officer’ is obliged to accord their office the dignity it is supposed to have. How we keep our offices speaks volumes about how we keep our homes, even if we may have lazy cleaners who seldom clean them.

More often than not, most of us have the audacity of attaching extraordinary importance to our offices, even if we do not duly dignify them. Of course, to do so is within human nature, since we are naturally not made to despise our own.

Yet, the way we treat our offices often lacks dignity. We have turned them into beer drinking places where we can booze to the maximum and leave behind a reek of beer to haunt our noble visitors.

One of these days, I visited a certain office for some informal business and I was shocked to the core to find the office in complete disarray, yet it was in the middle of the week. And I kept asking myself different questions on why an office that was supposed to be clean and always conducive to visitors should be such a shambles.

My curiosity grew so much that I had to ask the secretary why her boss’s office was such in a condition when he was a man who commanded a great deal of dignity once out there. The secretary did not mince words but instantly said that many people had already complained about the behaviour of her boss who seldom kept his office clean.

I learnt that the office was a constant beer drinking place where the secretary’s boss and his colleagues spent their time, when they thought they had nothing significant to undertake. But above all, my concern was basically on why the boss decided to keep his office in disarray despite the fact that his own presentation was so much admirable.

Oftentimes, our life is ruled by the honour of our offices – for those who have them – for there is no general honour attached to mankind other than the honour that which emanates from his most immediate surrounding; our hope is that which we create without speech, making others feel we deserve dignity not because of how we decently dress or eloquently speak, but how we treat every corner of our surrounding, including places where we may only spend eight hours per day, as in most general offices.

On the other hand, some ‘officers’ turn their offices into dens of immorality where they lure and entice women, including their secretaries, so that they can have sex with them. They do this under the roof of the rooms which were supposed to be so much dignified, and they remain calm, without any sort of compunction.

Joe Kissman, in his book titled Mankind: Social Beings, states that an office as a place where, mostly, formal business takes place, should be the last place to despise; it is the honour of the occupant because any mark left behind is a feasible dent on a Curriculum Vitae – no matter how small the mark may be – for you never know, your prospective employer might just decide to visit your former office before he employs you.

He goes further to say that our care that proceeds from offices emanates from our bedrooms and, therefore has the potential of ruining our chances to marry ‘careful’ wives. His point tries to summarise that the way our offices look is usually a reflection of our real livelihoods. A careful man will always keep his office clean and cannot hold a party there.

Then there are those officers who seldom spend time in their offices, even with no apparent reason. They accept appointments and promise to attend to the seeker of the appointments, but rarely fulfill their promise. They spend their time at entertainment centres during office hours and barely undertake their responsibilities.

And to a man who has knocked at numerous doors only to find that the bwana is not in, it is right to argue that the corrupting influence of powers trickles to the less-privileged and inflicts them most.