The Way Office Water Delivery Works
Ever since its invention, the water cooler – and subsequently,water for the office delivery – has been a long-lasting fixture in the modern office environment. Rather than a water fountain – which itself has its own cultural associations and connotations, even as a image of the American civil rights movement, another story for another time – many offices choose the use of a free-standing water cooler fitted with the easily recognizable five gallon tanks mounted to the top. In fact, this is what provides office water delivery its label, in that these five gallon jugs are literally delivered by truck to the office, typically all the time and usually in exchange for the empty jugs remaining from the prior month.
The preference for office water delivery and these free-standing units is normally one of function over form. Through there are the usual logistical distractions of having to physically manipulate the heavy, five gallon jugs received by office water delivery, the features of the unit itself more than make up for it. Whereas a water fountain generally only presents cooled water out of an individual spout, water coolers usually have a number of spouts, usually two or three. Needless to say there is the basic spout, which when managed with a simple lever delivers cold water, but it is not uncommon to find models with spouts for room temperature water, or even extremely hot, almost boiling water – perfect for use in making tea or fast coffee.
Apart from functionality, sanitation is a common reason for preference of office water delivery over locally available tap water by means of a water fountain. The reasonably sizable, free-standing units are usually laden with various water purification technologies which, in addition to the large jugs of water that happen to be already sanitized and purified at their bottling plants, make for the purest water available. Normally office water coolers use some form of activated carbon filtering, which uses specially treated charcoal to filter larger impurities (salts, dissolved inorganic compounds, etc) coming from the water.
In recent years, it has also been frequent for these units to be fitted with some kind of ultraviolent light treatment, which usually kills what might be left over after charcoal filtering: dissolved organic compounds, bacteria, etc.
Though extremely easy in design and purpose, the insufferable banality of the contemporary office cubical labyrinth has made the ubiquitous water cooler a sort of social hub at the office. So recognizable is this fact that colloquial terms like “water cooler show” have been coined off of it, in reference to the kind of trite dialogue about popular culture expected among employees gathering around the unit. Even the phrase “word around the water cooler” in reference to rumors or gossip has entered the cultural lexicon. Interesting that such an oddly mundane things as office water delivery can be, in a way, accountable for such widely familiar cultural phenomena.