How To Clean At Work
They are currently putting up the walls to a new office outside my cube. While it will be a nice change for the person getting the office, it has meant a lot of inconvenience and dust for the two of us next to the new wall.
Yesterday we all left to work from home because of the dust flying about from the sanding, and later a coworker reported that our cubes looked like they had survived the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
I knew I needed to clean before I could work today, but our office has few cleaning supplies. And cleaning at the office is very different from cleaning at home. Here is what I found I needed to completely clean my cube:
Cleaning Supplies
These are the supplies I found essential to cleaning the mess:
- Compressed Air. Even though I covered my keyboard and phone before I left, the compressed air blew the dust out of the cracks on the desk, the phone keys and the light switch.
- Screen cleaner. I have two LCD monitors on my desk and they require special cleaner.
- Surface cleaner. I brought in a can of Pledge.
- Duster. A good quality duster, like an ostrich feather duster or the disposable Swiffer dusters, are essential to removing the dust.
Cleaning the Cube
I found that the following plan of action worked best to remove the dust:
- Top of the walls. I started from the top down, getting the tops of the cube walls, the coat hook and my bookshelf. Any dust that wasn’t picked up by the duster settled on the uncleaned surfaces below.
- Monitors. I cleaned the screens and dusted all the wires.
- Keyboard, light and phone. I used the compressed air to blow out the keyboard, mouse and phone over the floor, making sure not to blow the dust on the desktop.
- Desktop. I went over the desktop with the Pledge.
- CPU. Next I dusted the outside of my CPU, which is under my desk (I also made an appointment to have the machine cleaned out by our hardware techs).
Simplifying Office Cleaning
Fortunately, I had a warm up in order to prepare for the big mess of this morning. When they put up the drywall, the dust settled on my cube as well, and I tool the opportunity to make some changes to simplify future cleaning:
- Limit what is on the desk top. I moved the pens into the drawer from the pencil cup. All filing was put away. Supplies were consolidated and stored in the drawer.
- Limit what you keep at work. I had many things that really didn’t need to be at work, so they were brought home. This included technical books, decorations, outdated pictures and extra hand lotion.
While this massive cleaning is not something I would care to repeat on a daily basis (or even the three separate times I did it this morning, as more dust was added to the air by the shop vac), it is good to know that I could quickly take care of a major mess with just a little preparation and a few supplies from home.
Photo by Bob Jagendorf
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