Water Cooler Archives

Doolally at the Water Cooler

by Fern Shaw | Mar 9, 2017 | Water, water cooler

If there’s one thing I love, its words. Long words; clever words; descriptive words; short words; double-entendres – they all make me smile.

What I love in particular though are euphemisms, or adjectives that have formed through colloquial speech and are either endemic to a particular region or country or have been picked up and adapted in different countries.

Depending on where you hail from, you probably use these expressions all the time, but perhaps you don’t know where they originate from. Here’s a choice few for your enjoyment. I for one, certainly didn’t know the origin of:

Doolally

What it means: Temporarily deranged or feeble-minded.

Example: ‘Uncle’s gone doolally again’.

Another meaning: Transported with excitement or pleasure.

Example: ‘I saw a pair of shoes that I know Doris would go doolally over’

Origin: Early 20th century: originally doolally tap, Indian army slang, from Deolali (the name of a town with a military sanatorium and a transit camp) + Urdu tap ‘fever’.

Argy-bargy

What it means: Noisy quarrelling or wrangling.

Example: ‘It’s all part of the argy bargy, he says, of the debate that has dominated politics over the past few months or so’.

Origin: Late 19th century (originally Scots): rhyming jingle based on argue.

Barmy

What it means: Eccentric or foolish.

Example: ‘If you ask me, that bloke going on about using sunflower oil as a petrol sounds right barmy’.

Origin: an obscure term derived from ‘barm’, that is, ‘the froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors,” which had been metaphorically, but sparingly, used to mean ‘flighty’ or ‘excited’.

Gee-gees

What it means: Horses. Usually children and gambler’s use.

Example: ‘I’m off to place a bet on the gee-gees’.

Origin: Possibly from the founding father of Chester Races, Henry Gee, whose name led to the use of the term ‘gee-gee’ for horses. Also, ‘gee’ or ‘gee up’ is also a command to get a horse to move faster. It’s also apparently used to have a draft animal turn right. As opposed to haw, which is a command to turn to the left.

There’s also a rather hysterical (imo) joke that goes:

How do you spell ‘Hungry Horse’ in four letters?

M T G G (Empty Gee-Gee).

Who knew? Well, now you do. Why not try them out on a colleague on your next trip to the water cooler when you’re replenishing your water. If nothing else, it’s sure to raise a laugh, especially if you’re having a big day at the office.

AquAid’s Best Practise Guide for encouraging fluid intake during the Work Day

by Fern Shaw | Feb 21, 2017 | Water, water cooler

We’re here to help. Yes, of course, we’re in the business of providing you with cool drinking (and hot) water at your premises, whether that’s at your office; warehouse; site; practice; university; college or school, but we’re also concerned with ensuring that you drink enough water to keep yourself well hydrated throughout the day, which is why we’ve written this ‘Best Practice Guide’ for you:

Step One

Educate: Having everybody in the work space on board is the most crucial component in an hydration plan. Educate yourself about the negative effects and downsides resulting from drinking too many fizzy drinks and caffeinated drinks instead of water. Use visual reminders – e.g. put up a poster illustrating good hydration techniques; these are a great way to continually reinforce to you the importance of drinking water. The benefits of drinking sufficient water are manifold.

Step Two

Assessment: The best way to assess your hydration status given the variables of body mass, work routines and other personal and physical aspects is to monitor urine colour. When you are drinking enough water your body is in balance and your urine will be a pale straw yellow colour (Hydrated). When you haven’t drank enough water your kidneys try to save as much water as they can and cause you urine to be darker in colour (Dehydrated). Speak to your local AquAid branch about our dehydration charts, which clearly illustrate the difference between being hydrated to mildly and severely hydrated.

Step Three

Implementation: – The most critical part of the best practise guide is to ensure that drinking water is very readily accessible and is appealing to drink. Keep a bottle of water on your desk to encourage continuous sipping during the day. If you’re in a smaller work space, perhaps you and your colleagues can ask that the water cooler be placed in an area that you can either see from your desk or that you are walking past on more than one occasion during the day.

Conclusion: Encouraging hydration during the work day can have a significant impact on your own overall performance and well-being. This requires a commitment from you, so keep up to date on the positive effects of staying hydrated.

Contact us at AquAid today – we’d be delighted to assist you with which water cooler dispenser is best suited for you based on your requirements.

Teach yourself good drinking water habits

by Fern Shaw | Feb 21, 2017 | Water, water cooler

Yes, yes, we know we blather on about water. A lot. But it’s mainly because we’re so invested and immersed in the provision of water and through this we’re well aware of the benefits of making sure you’re probably hydrated. We’re also aware that drinking water (perhaps because it’s so very vital to our function and well-being?) can become a chore, so the idea is what can you do to make a necessity seem like more fun?

Have a conversation with your inner child. Yep, do. Before you think I’ve gone doolally, (more about this word later) think about it. If you believe it’s important that your children don’t get into bad drinking habits – drinking sugary fizzy drinks or pop and the like – and you have them on the right track – why not apply the same mind-set to yourself? Take yourself back to the days when you raced around all over and chugged water all the time because that was your default setting – thirsty? Drink water.

Teach yourself good habits. There have been some rather unsettling reports about the lethargy produced from computer and office bound work. When you’re at work, combat these by ensuring that at your break times, you leave your desk and perambulate over to the water cooler area. While it won’t be welcomed if you pretend that you’re stalking prey at a watering hole in the Serengeti, a quick confab with your colleagues while you replenish your water bottle, will give your brain a break.

Stake your water bottle claim. Fun it up at the office by ensuring that your water bottle that you replenish at the water cooler is distinctive and ‘you’ branded and unlikely to be claimed by a magpie type colleague. Who knows, you could start a trend!

Use a straw. There’s just something about drawing liquid up through a plastic tube. Perhaps it’s reminiscent of how we drank as infants and babies – have sippy nozzle, will drink. Then there’s also a rather inexplicable appeal to brightly coloured, bendy tubes. Don’t ask. It just works.

Keep a glass of water next to your bed. Again, heading home, we refer to the child in us. Think about all the times a child will ask for water before they go to bed, or for that matter, after they’ve gone to bed. Granted, a lot of the requests for water at bedtime for younger children can be due to an avoiding going to bed tactic – we’re onto you, little person! – but children know when they’re thirsty and they don’t avoid the call – they act on it, as should you. So, to avoid you having to bash and crash your way to the bathroom or kitchen half asleep, keep a bottle of water or a pretty glass of water next to your bed. Not only will it help quench that raging middle of the night thirst, but it won’t eat into your resting time as much as it would if you keep on having to get up and traipse off to find water in another room.

Ten (Five) Reasons Having a Water Cooler Is Good For You – Part II

by Fern Shaw | Feb 21, 2017 | mains fed water cooler, water cooler, Water Coolers

Low Maintenance

You don’t need to worry about tedious maintenance and upkeep with a new water cooler. Unlike most appliances, they are very easy to maintain. Most units only require that you keep the dispenser or dispensing area clean. This usually means emptying the drip tray as needed. Aside from this, you don’t need to worry – all our sanitation engineers and delivery drivers have undertaken mandatory hygiene training and we automatically sanitise all bottle-fed water dispensers every 3 months and all mains-fed water dispensers every 6 months.

Features and Accessories

All AquAid Water Coolers offer features and options to best suit where they’re installed. For example, we assess whether you should be installing a bottle fed or mains fed water cooler and will recommend accordingly. A drinking chart is provided to illustrate how much water you should be drinking every day. For school installations, AquAid provide individual water bottles for the children.

Convenient Water with a Pure Fresh Taste

With a water cooler, you can enjoy the convenience of having on-demand water whenever you want it. The water is pure, fresh and great tasting. Our bottled water is sourced from natural springs from three locations around the UK and our mains fed coolers have advanced filtration systems providing you with clean, fresh drinking water. Best of all you’ll enjoy not having to bring your own bottled water purchased from stores every day as you’ll have access to water all day.

Charitable Aspect

Imagine that by your drinking water you’re benefitting those in need, and then speak to us because this is something that AquAid do. For each water cooler purchased and bottle of spring water that we deliver, a donation is made to the charities that we’ve supported since AquAid began.

Drink More Water

Many people that install water coolers for themselves, their staff, children, patients and customers find that they drink more water because it’s readily available. This means that you can enjoy a healthier lifestyle because you are drinking the recommended amount of water per day.

Whatever your water cooler requirements are, AquAid have more than twenty years of experience in the provision of the right water cooler for your work space – wherever you’re situated and whatever space you occupy throughout England, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

How to Waterly Increase Productivity in the Workplace

by Fern Shaw | Feb 21, 2017 | water cooler, Water Coolers

A survey conducted by a recruitment agency, polling hundreds of employers from various companies, found that the predominant reason for a drop in productivity was employees being glued to their mobiles.

Other employer bugbears which topped the list were:

Internet usage;

Social media;

Snack or smoke breaks;

Noisy colleagues.

*Fifty percent of employers surveyed nationally named mobiles and texting as the main bad habits getting in the way of work being done, while good old fashioned office gossip was their second biggest bugbear.

According to the survey, 24 percent of employers list ‘noisy co-workers’ as an obstacle to productivity, while another 23 percent say co-workers stopping by each other’s work spaces are to blame.

There seems to be a slight contradiction in the feedback though, as typing e-mails was also seen as a time waster, with a suggestion to rather walk on over and speak directly to the intended e-mail recipient as this was usually a lot quicker and used less time than typing up and sending the e-mail and waiting for a response. So, if you’re wasting time typing e-mails when a quick conversation will do, should you be inter office e-mailing or rather speaking directly to your colleagues, or not?

Employees chatting around the water cooler were also mentioned as a bugbear, but at least being at the water cooler, you’d imagine the initial idea would be water replenishment and as we know, drinking sufficient water at work (or throughout your day, wherever you are) has proven, time and again, to improve one’s focus, mental alertness and concentration, which more easily enables an increase in one’s productivity.

Perhaps the solution is to apply the adage ‘everything in moderation’ whereby employers can encourage healthy hydration habits but ask that their employees keep their water cooler time to be more water replenishment focused and less chit chat central.

*excerpts from an article at The Daily Mail

The origin of Valentine’s Day

by Fern Shaw | Feb 13, 2017 | Water, water cooler

Valentine’s Day, for some, is both one of the most dreaded and alternatively, most anticipated days in the February calendar, for a variety of reasons.

Dreaded because the day seems to have morphed into a rather commercialised and forced day of having to publicly declare your feelings of love and affection to your significant other.

Anticipated because the expectation of many objects of affection wait for bated breath to see what the day will bring them.

Sadly, the tradition and meaning of Valentine’s seems to have been lost, which is rather a pity as the real intent of aim (har har) of the day was rather lovely (and quite passionate!)

Examples through history:

*The earliest surviving valentine is a 15th-century rondeau written by Charles, Duke of Orléans to his wife, which commences:

Je suis desja d’amour tanné

Ma tres doulce Valentinée …

— Charles d’Orléans, Rondeau VI, lines 1–2

The earliest surviving valentines in English appear to be those in the Paston Letters, written in 1477 by Margery Brewes to her future husband John Paston “my right well-beloved Valentine”.

Valentine’s Day is mentioned ruefully by Ophelia in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600–1601):

To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,

All in the morning betime,

And I a maid at your window,

To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,

And dupp’d the chamber-door;

Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more.

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

Chaucer’s love birds

Jack B. Oruch writes that the first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in Parlement of Foules (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer.

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

[“For this was on St. Valentine’s Day, when every bride cometh there to choose his mate.”]

In the Victorian-era there was a language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, a means of communication in which various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send coded messages, allowing individuals to express feelings which otherwise could not be spoken. This language was most commonly communicated through tussie-mussies (small flower bouquets), an art which still has a following today, if in a much simpler manner.

The nuances of the language are now mostly forgotten, but red roses still imply passionate, romantic love and pink roses a lesser affection; white roses suggest virtue and chastity and yellow roses still stand for friendship or devotion.

Food for thought perhaps, for this Valentine’s Day – whether you choose to celebrate the day or not. If you are presenting/ receiving a tussie-mussie to/from your intended, remember to water it.

We do not, however, recommend that you use the water from your water cooler – that’s for human consumption – and they may need the water – to keep their skin looking all youthful and glowing and plumped up more than your bouquet does – especially if they didn’t receive any Valentine tributes.

source: Wikipedia

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