Office Offences: Part One; WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

Why is it ok to treat the office kitchen like crap? And why does basic etiquette and luch-room rules seem nonexistent in your place of employment? In this multi-part “rant“, the Fed Up team explores the work-place kitchen and why “the golden rule” does not seem to apply there.

Part One; WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

Take a peek inside the "no-mans-land" that is your office's break-room fridge. Just be prepared for the sights and smells you are going to come across.

You would never leave food rotting in your fridge at home. Well actually I do, but I solve that problem with making these…or by pawning the old food off on dinner guests. But it seems like all work-place break-rooms and office kitchens are exempt from the social norms and requirements that are practiced everywhere else.

Our office  break-room has got some very interesting items always lying around. I am pretty sure a lot of this stuff is the culinary equivalent of U.F.O.s and should be banned to Area 51. I am not culturally ignorant, I understand that foods from around the world can differ widely from a typical American tuna sandwich. But some of the items I have discovered in our office kitchen were just TOO far out there, and really could have come from Mars.

We do have a very culturally diverse workforce in our office building, but still I think there needs to be a limit to what is acceptable in the public kitchen. Some items smell nasty from the moment they are bought into the building… but their smell gets ridiculously bad after a few days of being neglected and left to putrefy in the bowels of the office kitchen.  I really do wonder what sort of magical power is possessed by ALL office kitchens, that causes people to forget about the food they brought to work that morning. There is some type of vortex or Bermuda-Triangle effect taking place in office kitchens that just leaves people completely oblivious to the fact that food goes bad.  The entire building soon reeks due to people’s inability to remember to eat their own damn lunches or at least toss them out before they turn into unidentifiable piles of mold. But fine, I eat stinky cheese and plenty of garlic, so I can deal with the smells of other people’s food…well at least before the rot sets in.

Seriously, I have no freaking clue what this is. I came across it when pulling my simple sandwich out of the fridge, and was completely dumbfounded trying to guess if this was food that had transformed due to excessive "aging" or was actually intended to look the slimy mess that it was. ...I hope the owner of this meal did not see me taking pictures of their food. That would be slightly awkward.

Then there are some foods that may not smell, but certainly do NOT belong in the work place. TRUE STORY: there was a LIVE turtle the other day in our kitchen…and YES it was intended as someone’s meal. At first, being the grub obsessed guy that I am, I was only terrified that someone’s lunch may actually eat MY lunch. Then I saw the bigger picture and realized there is a freaking LIVE turtle in our kitchen that someone plans to eat. I am ok with the random gelatinous goo, funky fruit, expired entrees, and the rotting remains from old take-out. I just think it is a little extreme to start bringing in livestock for luch…It is completely unpractical because I am sure it will take longer than your half-hour break to prepare.

Other items have been banished to the back of the office freezer for such a long time now that they would have to be chiseled out of their icy enclave. These containers have been there so long that no one could possible still know what is inside, and I am sure the original owner has long since left this place of employment. So these frozen ice-cubes of lunches past, will remain pieces of history and forever reside in the kitchen…until a new fridge is bought, or they are excavated and added to the Smithsonian  Museum of National History.

Items that have been banished to the freezer are rarely ever retrieved. They become artifacts that can now educate us on the evolution of weekday lunches, beginning with the early Paleolithic era to present day.

Sometimes our office kitchen is graced by the presence of fruit…but unfortuantly people often bring mashed and molding produce. It seems to me that my colleagues woke up one morning, said to themselves after searching their home fridge, “this crap is going bad here at my house, so lets just bring it to the office and hope someone else is desperate  enough to munch on it”…. I guess charity is a nice idea, but I am pretty sure you would get poisoned if you ate any produce THAT old.

So leave the unidentifiable foods , live animals, rotting fruit, and last-week’s leftovers at home…or at least hide it in a brown bag so it gets overlooked and blends in with everyone else lunch (but that won’t help the smell though).