I liked this particular cartoon from phdcomics. It reminds me of our lab, and it works for other workplaces as well. Click the comic to see it larger.

Beginning with the red square, my grad school lab could be freezing cold, so I’d put a zero there. Since I worked with lasers, I worked in the dark as well. It could be rather difficult to stay awake if you didn’t get enough sleep the night before. “Not enough sleep” is a permanent condition in grad school. My advisor (for workplace, insert manager here) was probably a “1″. He was quite calm most of the time. Although he had this really annoying habit of not answering your question if he didn’t think you did enough thinking and research on your own. You had to ask the question in the manner that told him you had thought things out a bit first and done quite a bit of journal searching and reading.

As for the white square, for years I’d say it was more “VOR,” but the past couple of years before I left it changed to “BIO”. We had one particularly grad student who smelled. He didn’t just bother those of us int he group. We shared offices with other graduate students from other groups. The stink bothered them too. They wanted me to acquaint the guy with soap before I left. None of them wanted to be the one to tell him that he stunk. It was gross. If you were lucky, keeping about four feet away meant your nose wasn’t stinging. I never got around to the anonymous letter, soap and deodorant instruction before I left. I had better things to do, and I thought they should handle it themselves.

I’d say that the blue square should have a “3″. Productivity could be sucked out of you almost as soon as you walked in the door. It shouldn’t have been that way, but it was. When I taaobutbut productivity, I’m talking about getting the stuff done necessary for the thesis. I spent a year working on hardware and software just to obtain data. That year was useless when it came to advancing my thesis. Only the data mattered. We also moved the lab at one point. Moving a laser lab means six months of downtime. More time lost.

Now my last job, I’d put a “4″ in the red square because pump alleys are notoriously loud, but climate is completely erratic (unbearably hot to unbearable cold). I’d put a “3″ in the yellow square. For the white box: “COR”. I’d give the blue box a “4″. I think several of my coworkers would agree since when I left someone suggested not returning because there was no advancement.

I would like to hear about others’ hazard rating of their workplaces. Hopefully, yours is better than mine was.