>What kind of office was this person working in?
An office on the property of an international airport. Our maintenance hanger happens to be behind our parking lot and immediately on the other side of it is an active runway.
If you work at an airport, not in the terminals, you get used to smelling aviation fuel/jet exhaust.
As far as the indoor temperatures, it's a leased building and the HVAC is just inadequate (my guess is when the HVAC was designed, the building probably wasn't largely an open office). The front of the building the HVAC works great, but it still has walls and doors blocking it from where the bulk of the staff is.
The algae in the pex tubing coming off of the water filter is because, for some reason, there's a random tube coming off that just terminates which allows some water to not get circulated. The chalky white of the water is just pure hard water, if you put some water in a dark coffee mug and let it sit for a few hours then dump it out and let it dry the inside will have a noticeable white film. This will rapidly build up day after day and actually start to flake off from thermal shock.
>Some of them are even health and safety violations.
They aren't. You might think they are, but they aren't. If they were, any hanger or warehouse at any significantly sized airport would have long since been shut down. Yes, I'm sure there is some unacceptable level that once measured can have legal action taken but I'd bet my kidney that we aren't anywhere near those exposure levels. It's not like a turbine is backed up 3 feet from our door, with the doors wide open, spewing exhaust. That doesn't mean you can't smell it though, you can smell jet exhaust at considerable distances not unlike diesel exhaust from larger vehicles.
Many on HN are accustomed to nice offices with a bunch of perks or remote work, but for a lot of us we work in conditions like this (or far worse) and it's just life. We have it much better than our people working at our sort facilities, they're exposed to the elements with minimal HVAC for example.
When I was 18 I worked at a cemetary, I had to wear a "backpack" full of diesel for a weed eater/whacker and trim weeds for hours at a time with no shade, then dig graves and cut grass with no shade. I'd go home sunburnt and smelling like diesel frequently, even getting sun poisoning at one point. My current job is so much better than that job 18 years ago, but it's also a far cry from what I saw a Y Combinator and Open AI a couple of years ago when I was visiting someone and I imagine that's how a lot of tech offices are like give or take some perks and creature comforts.