From the time of its invention, the water cooler – and subsequently,office water delivery – has been a permanent fixture in the modern office environment. Instead of a water fountain – which itself has its own cultural associations and connotations, even as a icon of the American civil rights movement, another story for another time – many offices choose the use of a free-standing water cooler fitted with the promptly recognizable five gallon tanks installed to the top. In fact, this is what provides office water delivery its title, in that these five gallon jugs are actually delivered by truck to the office, typically all the time and usually in exchange for the empty jugs remaining from the prior month.

The preference for office water delivery and these free-standing units is usually one of function over form. Through there are the usual logistical aggrevations of having to physically manipulate the heavy, five gallon jugs acquired by office water delivery, the features of the unit itself more than make up for it. Whereas a water fountain generally only provides cooled water out of an individual spout, water coolers generally have a number of spouts, usually two or three. Of course there is the primary spout, which when handled with a simple lever delivers cold water, but it is not uncommon to find models with spouts for room temperature water, or even extremely hot, almost boiling water – perfect for use in making tea or fast coffee.

Apart from functionality, sanitation is a common reason for preference of office water delivery over locally available tap water via a water fountain. The reasonably sizable, free-standing units are frequently laden with various water purification technologies which, in addition to the large jugs of water that are already sanitized and purified at their bottling plants, make for the purest water offered. Generally office water coolers use some form of activated carbon filtering, which uses specially treated charcoal to filter larger impurities (salts, dissolved inorganic compounds, etc) out of the water.

In recent years, it has also been frequent for these units to be fitted with some type of ultraviolent light treatment, which usually eliminates what might be left over after charcoal filtering: dissolved organic compounds, bacteria, etc.

Though incredibly simple in design and purpose, the insufferable banality of the contemporary office cubical labyrinth has made the ubiquitous water cooler a sort of social hub at the office. So familiar is this fact that colloquial terms like “water cooler show” have been coined off of it, in reference to the sort of trite dialogue about popular culture expected among employees gathering around the unit. Even the phrase “word around the water cooler” in reference to rumors or gossip has entered the cultural lexicon. Interesting that such an oddly mundane things as office water delivery may be, in a way, responsible for such widely identifiable cultural phenomena.

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