Clean up your own mess

What is it about a large group of people that makes it harder to keep a kitchen as clean as you would at home? In the last few days at work a growing number of those ‘corporate’ kitchen-type signs have appeared in our work kitchen … ‘scrub your coffee cups’, ‘dishwasher is on’, ’empty when done’, ‘keep bench tidy’ … I know I’m at the clean-freak end of the scale but really, are there that many people in an office-full of people who don’t or haven’t lived with someone else and know what it’s like to share filth, or don’t have or don’t have the observation skills to figure out if dishes in a dishwasher are clean or dirty? I guess in an individual family people might let dishes pile up on the bench and clear them away all at once at night, and this doesn’t work when 50 people are doing the same thing or leaving their cups and bowls soaking in the sink preventing others from easily using the tap. I only go in there for the cold water tap.

It’s just a social behaviour pattern than fascinates me – that individually people may have common sense but in a crowd perhaps not so much.