profile for Gajendra D Ambi on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

The unavoidable handshake [by (not) sheldon cooper]

I was thinking the other day about what my friend said and how would my favorite character from my favorite show big bang theory will approach this?
I am talking here about handshakes. If there are 100 team mates and let us say that there is one person who goes and does a handshake with everyone
let us do some data analysis

n = 100
x = 0
secs = 0 # seconds spent per person in shaking hands and hi, hello, how r u, i'm fine, how r u doing? am fine too...etc.,
while (x < n):
    m = n-x # number of unique handshakes
    secs += m*30 # 30 seconds per handshake
    x=x+1

mins = secs/60 # 151500 seconds
hours = mins/60 # 2525 minutes

print(hours) # 42 hours
'mutual loss of hours' = 42*2 = 84 hours a day# since both of the parties spend these 30 seconds during a handshake

So you already know that on an average even if you spend a minimum of 30 seconds per unique handshake (excluding the time it takes to walking upto each person) then there are 21 weekdays per month, so it is 21days*12 months*84 hours = 21,168 hours = 2,646 shifts wasted per year (8 hours shift).
Let us now look at the hygiene part of it...
There is at least one nose picker out of 100,
There is at least one sweaty person with sweaty hands in the team,
There is at least one person who every now and then scratches somewhere which you don't want to know,
There is at least someone who touches their face with lotion or make up,
There is at least one person who has, or gong to have or has but not affected with cold, fever or some kind of mild air borne stuff that you don't want to catch.
Please note that all of the above are extremely conservative points to consider when i say ' there is at least one'.
Now there are many weeks per year where suddenly the weather is such that people start getting fever, cold, cough or something else of that sort and what better way to spread it across the team than a hand shake which has touched their leaky nose, or the scarf/tissue with which they are controlling their cold. If god forbid there is someone who has bought some sweets or eatables or even some chocolates or biscuits and if you happen to eat them with your hands which now has germs from 99 other members of your team then good luck with that.
So what is the solutions?
Namaste!!!
but when someone fetches their hand towards you then you can't just say namaste and keep doing whatever you were doing. The other less offensive and positive approach to it would be, you be the one to do it and get it over with it :).
You come in.
dock your laptop.
go to each person of the team from corner A to corner Z.
shake their hand.
you : how are you?
they: i'm fine, thanks. how are you?
you: i'm doing fine as well. thank you.
(repeat)*x where x is the number of team mates left to shake hand for the day.
Once you are done with the last member, you go wash your hands, sit at your desk and start doing whatever you do.

What about someone who is crossing your way and asks, how are you?
by the time you say: 
I am fine,
thank you.
how are you doing?
and then they say: i am fine too.
thanks.
take care.
they would have moved so much away from you. This is awkward. So what would jesus do? I mean shelly do?
He would say one of the following...
(almost) as good as you,
(almost) as great as you,
(almost) as pretty as you...

So the cons are:-
  1. each of your 100 employees will get disturbed or had to pause whatever that they are doing for 99 times
  2. if anyone of your 100 employees is unwell or has cold/fever/cough or anything which has 'airborne transmission' then the rest 99 of the employees have a chance of getting infected which may result in more sick times of your employees.
  3. 21,168 hours per year spent on handshakes
  4. it is hard to get back to what you were doing (imagine you are writing some complex machine learning algorithm ) when you get 99 greetings per day at different and unexpected times a day.
  5. It makes the receiver of such a greeting on each day feel that he/she being less social by not doing the same and thus he/she has to do the same too and thus by peer pressure do the same as the other person did.
Will I listen to sheldon cooper then and follow this?
Naaaaaaaaaaaaa, coz i'm ambi not s cooper. :)