In my time in Thailand, I’ve worked in a lot of offices, and they’ve all been very different – from a small family-run operation to a huge, multi-cultural office spread across multiple floors and buildings. In formulating my previous rant post about working in an office, I thought a lot about what it meant to work in an office in Thailand, and made a stray observation that I thought was interesting – in every Thai office you’re in, you will almost always find the same three things. I’ve been here long enough that they aren’t weird for me anymore, but for someone new to Thailand, they must seem very strange.

Can you think of what they are? Here is what I observed:

1) Someone wearing ridiculous, oversized slippers.

2) Pieces of paper taped across the air conditioning vent to block or redirect the airflow.

3) A communal snack table overflowing with goodies from around the world.

To the evidence. First, the slippers:

Slippers from the movie Lilo & Stitch on my coworker. I guess the idea is that you’re inside and in Asia that often means shoes off. To keep clean, wear slippers. In a western office these would be wholly inappropriate, but you can’t deny they add some color to the place.

Second, the air vents:

Office 1

While I’m walking around feeling quite comfortable, my coworkers are manually redirecting the flow of the air conditioner away from them. I guess a sub-section of this would be the special indoor jacket.

Third, the communal snack table.

Office 3

One of the things I had to get used to was the Thai custom of bringing back snacks for friends and coworkers after a trip – any trip. Some juice or tea or chocolate or nuts…whatever you do, don’t return from a trip without some type of offering to your office, to be dumped on a nearby table and picked over by grazing coworkers when the mood strikes.

 Did I miss anything?