All right, we do keep the coffee flowing. But other than that, you’ll mostly find near-teetotallers here, adhering to the principle of mens sana in corpore sano (“a sound mind in a sound body”). As one colleague once put it, when someone suggested after-work drinks: “You mean we’re all just going to sit on a terrace and order juice boxes?” Well, yes.
Surely, things were different back in the day. Before 2004, that is – the year in which Dutch employees finally earned the right to a smoke-free workplace (bars and restaurants excluded)? Actually, no; despite what the ashtray suggests, very little smoking ever took place in the office. One colleague confesses, “In the mornings we’d sneak outside for a cigarette, because we didn’t really smoke.” The ash ended up in the back garden of the building on Keizer Karelplein.
So, free to a good home: a metal ashtray, almost certainly rarely or never used.