Last Wednesday was apparently National Walking Day (in America). At my work they’ve been championing personal health and wellness for a while now (having apparently all but eradicated accidents (save the idiot who tripped over a marginally raised flagstone a couple of weeks ago, resetting the “586 days without an accident” counter back to zero…)) so they were all over this. Participation was entirely ‘optional’, but you’d never know it by the seemingly endless stream of emails, calendar invites, and reminders that were sent out in the weeks leading up to National Walking Day. It also doesn’t help that my boss is actually the site-wide Safety Nazi for our ‘campus’ (a collection of four drab buildings in one of the less-salubrious Houston neighborhoods), which meant that my team and I were given extra ‘encouragement’ to participate.
I was pretty ambivalent about the whole thing, mainly because I don’t think it should be necessary to encourage people to walk. If they had a National Half-Marathon day then sure, I could see that as a worthwhile challenge and maybe give it a go, but walking? I think I’ve got that down, thank you very much. Although maybe I’m missing something in my technique because my boss instructed us all to “dress appropriately” for what rapidly escalated into a ‘team activity’. I usually manage to walk from my house to my car, from my car to my desk, and from there to the restroom and back several times a day (I’m old) in my standard work attire of Banana Republic chinos and shirt, and a pair of (vegan) Dr. Martens shoes without incident, and had naturally assumed that this was therefore ‘appropriate dress’ for walking pretty much anywhere else, including along the designated ‘walking path’ (especially as someone had probably already been instructed to do a ‘safety walk’ along the path the day before, removing dangerous obstacles like twigs and leaves). But no! On the day, a lot of people took advantage of the opportunity to wear jeans and ‘running shoes’ (which, in most cases, had clearly never been used for something as strenuous as running), but there were also several people who wore tracksuits – and one enthusiastic participant even wore a headband! Really! To walk!! And none of this ‘power-walking’, just regular one-foot-in-front-of-the-other controlled falling type of walking. How on earth do they ever manage to walk to their desk on mornings without the power of the headband?? Maybe they had an extra-large Power Balance Bracelet underneath it…
But despite my initial reservations (and my apparent lack of suitable attire), I thought I’d take part in the walk anyway. Primarily this was because all of the rest of my team were going (bar one, who is evidently too unfit to actually manage the walk – oh, the irony!), and if they are going to get paid for 20 minutes of ambling around the campus I figured I was entitled to do the same (in much the same way as I’m considering taking up smoking so that I get to go and stand outside in the ‘fresh’ air for 20 minutes every hour like the rest of the wheeze-bags huddled around the butt-bin). But my secondary motivation was that, in a bid to improve participation, the company was holding a raffle for all participants, with a couple of dozen prizes ranging from FitBits to gift cards to various sporting goods stores. My GF has been using a FitBit recently and I kind of like the theory, so I figured I’d take my chances with the rest of them and maybe get something other than a barely-elevated heart rate out of it.
So on Wednesday morning I wander out to the official ‘starting line’, and approach the raffle table to sign up and try my luck. But as I approached, I noticed the THREE signs on the table (in case you missed the first two of them), pointing out that the raffle was “For Employees Only”. What? Whaaaat!?
Now, I have long accepted that contractors (of which I am one – albeit of 21 years’ standing with this particular client) are second-class citizens. And I understand that there are some things that the company can do for its own employees that they can’t do for contractors – and I’m sure it’s entirely co-incidental that these are things they can write off against tax. Recently the company has been offering cash back to employees who join a gym, or buy a FitBit, or go for a health check-up. And recently they offered free ‘health screenings’ for all employees who wanted one (although this necessitated giving a blood sample, and I wouldn’t put it past them to re-use these for their own purposes). I get that these could be construed as ‘benefits’, like health insurance is, and therefore can only be offered to employees, but a raffle?? At the start of every project I work on, project management go to great pains to point out that although the project is made up of a mix of employees and contractors from assorted agencies (and often at least half the team are contractors), we are all “one team, with one goal”. And as part of this ‘one team’, contractors are required to take part in the same ‘safety initiatives’ as employees (including performing ‘safety observations’, attending mandatory safety meetings, and so on), so to then find out that although we are expected to take part in the walk (which, incidentally, was sponsored by the Safety Committee) we’re not allowed the same opportunity to win a participatory prize is pretty much a slap in the face. Which is a bad thing not because an actual slap in the face would hurt but because the ‘safety incident’ paperwork you’d have to fill in as a result of getting a slap in the face would be death by a thousand (paper) cuts….
Though to be fair, contractors didn’t leave the walk entirely empty-handed. We did get a free banana and a bottle of water upon crossing the finishing line – but I think that was probably because they didn’t think they’d get away with insisting that the contractors use a separate water fountain…
Not that I collected my free water. Once I saw that contractors weren’t allowed to take part in the free raffle I decided to boycott the event, and staged a defiant sit-in, instead. At my desk, in front of my PC, where I put in another 20 minutes of work while everyone else enjoyed a leisurely stroll in the sun. There, that should show them that I’m not going to take this kind of blatant discrimination sitting down. Oh, wait…
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