Vietnamese Office Life
On the opposite side of the coin of night life is office life. I am always interested to see what more of the mundane aspects of life are in various places, and office life in Vietnam is no exception.
It takes around 45 minutes for our morning commute round, dropping off Ama at the one office and the rest of us at the other. (It takes around 10-15 minutes for our afternoon commute, when we are the last stop and the office is just over a bridge from our hotel. The longest part of that afternoon ride is the u-turn we have to pull past our hotel to turn around and enter the hotel parking, when some of the 80 million mopeds crowd the road in our way.)
Our commute takes us through some back roads, and we’re lucky enough to catch some dog being brought out for breakfast. I gleefully revive one of my favourite vegetarian debates about how meat is cultural, much to the chagrin of my colleagues.
The office is in a four-story building behind a little car park. There is a gym on the third floor. Our team works on the fourth floor but there are teams on the second as well. There’s a bank on the first floor. It’s quite a convenient, nice office building really. We typically take the elevator up with our hosts instead of taking the stairs.
The first and biggest difference you’ll note is that you take your shoes off when you enter. No one wears shoes in the office (or in their homes, for that matter) as is typical in Asia. (And in my house. It really is one of those weird things—why would you bring your outdoor shoes to the inside of your house!?) There is a guest shoe rack where you place your shoes. I have to remember to wear socks over my stockings so I’m not running around stocking-footed. (There is a separate small room at the top of the stairs where the employees keep their shoes.)
The second difference is that there are foam sandals outside the bathroom for you to wear when you go in. No shoes in the office, no shoes in the bathroom—but who wants to walk in socks or barefoot to a bathroom? No. So there are shared sandals you slip into when heading to the loo, and slip them back off for the next person to use afterwards. I get pretty good at doing this without hands because I’m not sure that you’re supposed to touch the sandals with your hands after washing your hands.
The bathroom itself I find quite charming. There are plants which I think is cute. Luckily Victoria has given me a heads-up about how to use the bathroom: the signs in the stalls aren’t lying when they say that you shouldn’t throw toilet paper into the toilet.
Using the bathroom goes like this:
- Walk up from your desk, in your socks or barefoot
- Slip on a pair of shared sandals outside the bathroom door
- Enter your gendered restroom
- Turn left and grab the toilet paper that you need (imagine the judgement of how much toilet paper you use)
- Enter a stall
- Do your business
- Wipe, and toss your toilet paper into the trash bin in the stall and definitely not into the toilet bowl
- Flush
- Leave the stall and wash your hands
- Dry them on a shared cloth towel or on your trousers
I suppose there’s a ‘Use the bidet’ step in there between 6 and 7 depending on your business.
Other than that, the routine is fairly regular. We’re set up comfortably at our desks, go to meetings in rooms that have a Wayfair-like feel to them (home-related names, furniture that supports that theme), and otherwise just go about our work days. I get both the typical day-to-day work of Slack and email done in addition to user interviews. There are a few mornings that I spend Slacking with coworkers 12 hours ahead, well into their evenings and nights, due to a number of small disasters going on back at the office. But by noon things quiet down and I can focus on work here.
Mark wants the place to be comfortable and his employees to be happy. They genuinely do seem to enjoy themselves—when I’m taking pictures I catch a couple friends fighting each other to clock out at the machine. There are plenty of plants. There’s no AC while we’re there, but fans at the end of every row, so there’s a nice amount of white noise and I’m not frigid in an office for once. Our desks are stocked with endless bottled water, and if we want in the mornings, someone will go out for hot or iced (jet fuel) coffee. Tessa has one on our first day in the office and shakes well into the afternoon, not accustomed to coffee but equally unaccustomed to this new time zone.
Well, everything is fairly regular except for that one time a cockroach fell from the ceiling vent in the middle of a meeting. But honestly, who among us hasn’t had to deal with an unwelcome cockroach or two every now and again in our lives?
On our last day, we go through a litany of good-bye photos with the team, none of which luckily make it to my phone. I do ask for a picture with one woman on the team who is wearing a strawberry sweater that is a twin to my carrot sweater; something that can’t be that uncommon because I’ve also seen it on the back of a moped in yellow.
The most chaotic day is the one on which we arrive to find that there’s no power. It’s Wednesday, our third day here at work. We get to the office and it’s dark—the sort of half-lit emergency lighting when only one in every four lights is on. Within 15 minutes, the backup generator runs out of juice. Apparently the electricity company had planned to do some work that was supposed to end at 7AM, but here it is just past 9 and the power’s still out.
Once the backup generator runs out, people sit around or goof off until the official word comes to go home until the power’s back on. We head instead to a nearby café with both power and WiFi. By the time we’re set up, however, I barely have time to complete my open enrolment that’s due on the slow Wifi here by the time we have to pack up and leave for lunch. (I do enjoy a latte and a slice of passionfruit cake, all tart and bright yellow, before we go.)
Unexpected things like this remind you to have empathy when working with people in other countries—or even with those in your own country—when power outages or fire drills cut into the work day.
It’s just selling furniture, after all; how important can it be in the grand scheme of things?