You Have No Authority Here
I work with documents from a short-wall cubical. I get to my office at around 6 AM. My boss shows up around 5:30 AM. It’s just us for the first few hours of the day. We prefer the lights off because we have windows producing natural light when the sun comes up.
The lights in the office are too bright and bother us. Every single day, this guy, we’ll call him Ron, shows up and turns on all the lights in the office. Ron will even turn on the lights in rooms with no one in it. We’ve told him that we don’t like the lights on in our area. It’s bothersome.
Ron flips out and says we have no authority over the lighting in this area and that OSHA is on his side. He then calls up the legal team and demands for an OSHA representative to be sent to check for the lighting levels in the office. Someone came out and said it’s fine. Ron demands another test.
This time they send a team of people to check the light levels and try to come up with a solution. Because of this, a lot of testing has to be done on our light system.
So now, we have maintenance people running around turning the lights on and off to see what happens. This has been going on for months. Everyone in the office is sick of the lights being messed with but Ron keeps making a deal about it.
Recently, a couple of people have sided with Ron that the lights should be at full power at all times throughout the day. So now there’s a huge feud in the office between team no-lights and team full-bright-blinding-lights.
The teams are getting bigger and it’s to the point where some work isn’t getting done because of the feud. Some people say, “I can’t work with the lights so bright—I’m going home,” while others say, “The lights aren’t bright enough and I can’t see without them on so I’m going home until OSHA fixes it.”
People are starting to play pranks on each other, such as buying lamps and flashlights for team bright lights. This is a huge company, think Google or Microsoft size, yet we’re raging a war based on a light switch.