by Fern Shaw | Feb 24, 2016 | water cooler
Two summers ago, I blogged about keeping yourself tuned and fit while at work. Now, apparently it’ll be spring in a few weeks but for the moment it looks like we’re really still in the grip of winter. Despite this rather chilly weather, now is a good a time as any to get on the ol’ treadmill (so to speak) and intersperse your slothfulness in the office with some get routines that’ll have you fit and ready for when you’ve shed your winter gear (and hibernation habits).
Here are a few to try out:
The Office Genie: Want to add a little magic to the workday? Raise the legs into a criss-cross applesauce position while seated in a chair. With your hands on the armrests, push upwards to raise the body off the seat and remain floating for 10-20 seconds. Release back down to the chair, rest for a minute, and repeat. Caution – test the strength of chair arms with your legs unfolded first – you don’t want to be pretzled into a position and then your chair collapses.
The Shoulder Shrug: Not recommended for board meetings (unless you’re really on the fence). Simply raise both shoulders up toward the ears, hold for 5 seconds, and then relax. Repeat for 15 reps.
The ‘Wheeee’+ Desk Chair Wheel: Go ahead, play with your wheelie chair (everyone wants to!). While seated in a chair with wheels, position yourself at arm’s length from a desk or table and grasp its edge with your hands. Next, engage the core*, raise the feet slightly off the ground, and pull with your arms until the chair slowly rolls forward and your chest touches the desk’s edge. Then roll back by pushing away, with the feet still raised. Repeat 20 times, or until you burn holes into the carpet. *engage the core essentially means shoulders down and back; spine straight and lock your stomach and pelvic muscles.
The Stair Master: Want to avoid lift small talk in favour of elevating the heart rate? Take the stairs! Accelerate on the straight-aways and take two at a time every other flight for a real leg burn.
The Last (Wo)Man Standing: Sure, standing around isn’t exactly traditional exercise, but research shows it’s got more than a leg up on sitting. After all, long periods of sitting are linked to increased risk for diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, whereas standing significantly increases your daily caloric expenditure. Stand whenever you can, and consider roping in other colleagues to have standing meetings too.
Last (wo)man standing can, of course, be easily held when you head off to the water cooler to replenish your water (that you will really need to be drinking more than usual if you’re going to be starting up with these wonderful get fit ideas).
I’ll see you on the common beginning spring with your shorts on at this rate!
by Fern Shaw | Feb 10, 2016 | Charity, water cooler, Water Coolers
If you have ever struggled with debt, you may have heard of our company, Carrington Dean. What we do is simple: we help those who are hopelessly in debt to get out of debt through management plans like IVAs, debt arrangement schemes, and bankruptcy.
But it’s one thing to say that, and quite another to actually do it every day. Every person who walks into our office and asks us for help has a story to tell. It can be a story of loss, a story of heartbreak, a story of fear. It keeps them up at night and robs them of their time, privacy, and security. It makes them fear for their families and their futures.
There isn’t a day that goes by that these stories don’t affect me and every person who works in our offices. Moreover, I’ll be honest. Sometimes it’s hard. We are constantly faced with the reality that our society doesn’t do enough to help good people. Every day, struggling families are allowed to just fall through the cracks.
Helping others is at the heart of the work we do and we are always looking for more ways that we can do that. There is nothing quite like the reward of seeing a smile on a client’s face that first day that they realise the clouds are parting and they are finally getting back on track. It really is like a ray of sunshine. For that person, their entire life has changed.
That’s why we look for every opportunity we can find to incorporate charity into our work. We regularly give to Mothers Care India, an organisation that helps children in impoverished parts of India to get an education.
That’s also why it means so much to us that we get to partner with AquAid. AquAid provides all of the water coolers that we use in our offices. This is yet another small but very real way for our business to contribute to charity work. We love that this is written on the coolers themselves. It is a very visible mark of the charitable spirit that is at the core of what we stand for. It communicates what we care about to customers and associates who visit us, and it also serves as a permanent reminder for our staff that we can and do make a difference.
On days when I am frustrated and standing at the water cooler, I realise just how many organisations and people who are out there who do care. AquAid and Carrington Dean are likeminded organisations infused with community spirit.
So we just want to say thank you to AquAid. Your work is changing lives, and you’re empowering us to help people across borders who will never find their way into our offices.
by Fern Shaw | Nov 9, 2015 | water cooler
Funny story. I social media-ed a friend the other day to ask him his opinion on a newish restaurant in our area – the type of jeuj (my word) restaurant that one usually only finds in town or city centres. He replied that the food was really good, but his one question was in the form of a hashtag #wewantplates, as apparently most of their courses were served on stone type boards reminiscent of the ‘80’s steak house grub that used to come on sizzling hot rocks and invariably take your eye out with the fat splatters* (more about this later).
Then this week, while having a gander at what’s trending in the U.K., I chanced upon a hilarious and rather troubling Twitter campaign titled – you guessed it – @wewantplates.
**The account was set up by Ross McGinnes, a journalist from West Yorkshire after a friend posted a photo of a steak on a slate online.
In just a week, the campaign has already attracted some 5,000 followers with his series of witty ripostes to restaurants who have dared to inject a large portion of gimmick into their presentation of meals.
Examples of novelty food presentation ranged from high tea set out on mini gardening benches through to bread in a hat. Yes, really, bread served in a flat cap. Hopefully, the cap hadn’t been worn before.
Other novelties include deconstructed tea served with milk in test tubes; Brie balls served in Camper shoes; bread served in slippers (not kidding) in Switzerland and butter slivers served on a broken bathroom tile.
Aside from the sizzling hot rock fiasco, I think the most adventurous I’ve ever ventured is to eat lunch (nothing too soggy, mind) off a wooden breadboard at my German mate’s house – and I survived, so all good. I believe I’d draw the line with any of the above presentation styles though, but without doubt, the one novelty serving style that would mean my bottom not even touching the chair would be an Italian restaurant where diners are invited to tuck into a sharing portion of spaghetti and sauce on a bare surface. Mamma mia, no! Just, no!
*In the spirit – aha – of complete transparency to do with ‘hot rock’ cooking, I went one step further in trying to remove my face at one of these occasions by splashing loads of spirit vinegar over my chips while my steak was still ‘cooking’ and almost succeeded in flambéing not only myself but my dinner companion. This is just another reason why people start up campaigns like @wewantplates – the ‘safety to the diner’ factor.
When all is said and done though, isn’t it nice to know that at least you know when you swagger on up to your water cooler, you’re pretty much guaranteed of being reliably served up a cool draught of spring water or a mug of piping hot water, depending (of course) on which product you have on your premises. No bare bones, gardening shed, flat cap serving going on here, dear!
**extracts from an article at the Mail Online
by Fern Shaw | Oct 19, 2015 | water cooler
I was trolling the net, looking at what’s trending this week in the U.K. when it occurred to me – whatever happened to all of those ‘Pet Rocks’. No, I don’t mean your pet rocking out on some YouTube clip, I’m referring to the 1970 something craze of having your own Pet Rock to take care of.
In case you don’t have a clue as to what I’m referring to, here’s some more info, ‘In April 1975, Gary Dahl (founder of the pet rock) was in a bar listening to his friends complain about their pets. This gave him the idea for the perfect ‘pet’: a rock. A rock would not need to be fed, walked, bathed, or groomed; and would not die, become sick, or be disobedient. He said they were to be the perfect pets, and joked about it with his friends. Dahl took the idea seriously, and drafted an ‘instruction manual’ for a pet rock. It was full of puns, gags and plays on words that referred to the rock as an actual pet’ – Wiki
Now you know. If you missed this trend or craze, for whatever reason, bet you’re pleased round about now! But what about other crazes or trends in the last few decades that we look back at and can apply the oft used expression, ‘I’m so glad there wasn’t any social media when I was growing up’? Here are a few examples that may have you groaning into your water bottle:
Tamagotchi’s; Mr Motivator; Sega Mega Drives and Tetris.
Yo-yos; jelly aliens in plastic eggs; Pokémon cards and glow-in-the-dark jewellery.
Banana and butterfly hair clips.
Big hair; leggings and, of course, the ubiquitous Shell Suit. In case you were wondering what a shell suit was, this was big, fashion wise, in the eighties. The shell suit was a pretty bizarre fashion statement, jumping on the leisure wear trend à la Flashdance. It was a trend that allowed people who blatantly never did any form of exercise to look like they did, and it came in the form of nylon waterproof trousers and a matching jacket. It was during this time that fluorescent materials were at the very peak of their popularity. This meant that all manner of different garish colours and fluorescent strips were thrown together and it really didn’t matter if it clashed or not – in fact, if it did clash that was all the better.
While I was writing this and chuckling meanly to myself about how awful some of the trends i.e. the shell suit, were back then, and congratulating myself about how we truly have come a long way, baby, a thought occurred to me. In a word – the Onesie.
‘nuff said. Trolling trend water cooler critiquer out.
by Fern Shaw | Aug 24, 2015 | Water Boilers, water cooler
Let’s fact check here for a moment.
This is a blog page.
The running (aha) theme is generally about all things watery.
There’s heaps of information about the supply of water and how we deliver said water to you, dear customer, through the provision of our spankingly smart range of:
Bottled Water Coolers
Mains Fed Water Coolers
Water Boilers
Hotel and Catering Solutions
Water for Schools
Water Fountains and
Accessories
so, it’s important to keep you informed about the importance of drinking water; to advise about how to keep from becoming dehydrated (occurs more often and easier than you might think); what to drink; how often to drink it and in general; how to keep yourself healthily hydrated.
But the one question I don’t think I’ve asked as yet is: What makes you thirsty?
Are you like me where when you go to the pictures, it’s not officially an occasion unless you have a bucket of very over-salted popcorn and then when your tongue swells up and you feel like you’ve been eating dry desert sand, you wonder why you are so thirsty?
or, are you more of a be out all day in warm weather, keeping active, running from place to place, sweating a bit and wait-until-the-last-minute where you’re absolutely parched and then you guzzle fizzy drinks (packed full of bad sugars) which will probably make you more thirsty than before you drank them.
or, do you load up on the Chinese or American fast food which is packed with too much salt (and then you still add loads of salt to your meal or chips) and again, wonder why you’re feeling so thirsty?
Whatever your thirst metiér is, I’m sure it doesn’t help realising that most of our extreme thirst is self-imposed. Us humanoids, such silly beings, aren’t we?
by Fern Shaw | Jul 31, 2015 | water cooler
Caught me by surprise too – smoaster – what the hey does that mean, I asked myself? Being all things food and drink, I though perhaps it was something to do with s’mores or boasting at the water cooler, but it isn’t. Apparently, it’s unnecessary boasting on social media, which begs the question – is there any boasting on social media that is necessary? Probably not, I suppose.
Examples of smoasting would be something like:
* Having a great day! Not vs. having had a bad day previously, but just trumpeting for no rhyme or reason that you’re having a great day. Necessary? Not likely.
*Smoasting repeatedly about your session at the gym, ’Did abs today!’ or ‘Shoo, some workout’ – again, probably unnecessary.
*Boasting about your child’s achievements, no matter how mundane or insignificant to others. Your 19 month old just counted to 10. Something to be proud of? Absolutely! Necessary to smoast about? Again, unlikely.
Consistent self-congratulatory smoasting is bad enough, but smoasting about your children could be potentially dangerous.
I wonder whether our need to feel liked and accepted overcomes our common sense in such instances. If you’re posting endlessly about your new born; toddler or worse, setting them up with their own social media account, is this akin to displaying your child on a huge billboard in Hyde Park? And if it is, would you do so?
Perhaps I’m being a little serious and Mother Grundy about this, but perhaps, also, this is something to consider when you’re next tempted to smoast about every single minutia in not only, your own life, but that of your kids.
As for me, I’m heading up to the water cooler to smoast about how I learnt a new word today. Trendy, me!
