Are everyones coworkers such slobs?

[Tastes of Chocolate]

Most of my coworkers are fine, but there are at least a couple that need maids to clean up behind them.

1) We have a kitchen/breakroom. Often there is food out for general consumption in there. Every Friday, someone fires up the movie theatre style popcorn machine and makes popcorn. There is always a trail of food crumbs spilling from whatever is out, across the room and out the door. You must have dogs at home to hoover up this trail behind you.

2) The kitchensink. I know that the cold dregs of coffee in the bottom of a cup suck. Blech, I don't blame you for not wanting to drink that. The breakroom has thoughtfully been provided with a good sized, double bowl sink, just perfect for dumping your sludge into. Yet every day, there is dried coffee spills all over the counter, right next to the sink. How can you miss the sink EVERY DAY, and be so oblivious that you can't wipe up your spills?

3) Ice cubes - No ice makers for us. We use the old fashioned ice cube trays. 6 of them, usually emptied and refilled twice a day. It's not hard. You give it a twist, dump the cubes into the handy bin in the freezer, refill and place back into the freezer. Total time? 30 seconds. But someone, on finding the bin empty, plucks half the cubes out of a tray, and then leaves. Did you fail to notice that the ice cube fairy doesn't stop here? If you don't refill it, someone else doesn't get ice.

4) Toilet paper rolls. How hard is it to replace the roll? There are always between 1 and 6 spare rolls sitting on the tank of EVERY toilet in the place. Remove the old core, unwrap the new roll, place roll on the holder, throw away the old roll and wrapper. Easy. But no, I end up changing between 2 and 5 rolls every week. I don't spend that much time in the bathroom. Grow up, replace your own roll. I know you can do it.

Excuse me while I go print out instructions for use of a toilet paper holder and post it in all the stalls.

Idiots.

[Podkayne]

In the one place I work: When I arrived, there was this scary brown sludge on the bottom of the sink in kitchen area. I mean, s-c-a-r-y. It was a film about an eighth of an inch thick—of what I can only guess. Let us just say I'm glad it was the physics department not the bio department. It was protected for a while by my not-my-problem field, until one day I just got sick of being afraid to put my dishes down on the sink bottom while washing them. I used paper towels and plenty of soap and hot water and scrubbed away the sludge. Since then, all it has taken to keep the sink clean is me quickly wiping the sink bottom with soapy water each time I wash out my lunch dishes. Really, folks. That's all it takes!

In the other place I work: The cafeteria that makes very nice soup with fresh veggies, and gives you a discount if you save a tree and bring in your own bowl. It's very popular option, especially with grad students. There is a person who doesn't eat certain vegetables from her soup, notably mushrooms. I know exactly who it is, because I've seen her pick around them while we're eating lunch. And when she washes her bowl out, she just leaves the vegetables in the strainer in the sink drain. What does she think is going to happen to them? They'll be carried off by vegetable gnomes? They'll disintegrate naturally? Someone's going to come along and say, "Mmm, someone else's discarded mushrooms!" and eat them?

[Ashes, Ashes]

A bunch of mine are nasty pigs who ruin it for the rest of us. Keep your damned feet off the sofas and if you re-arrange things put them back the way they were. Not everybody wants to sit in your shoe dirt or be unable to walk through the maze of furniture you've constructed.

Did you bring your maid to work today? No? In that case, I'm talking to you, PigBoy. If you spill it, clean it up. No! Clean... it...up! We have wheels of paper towels bigger than your head. Clean it!

You are not thoughtfully providing an attractive tablecloth by leaving your newspaper spread all over the lunch tables, and you know it, Slick.

Cover your food in the microwave or clean up the mess you left. There is nothing less appetizing than food splattered a quarter inch thick because you've not mastered the subtleties of placing a paper towel over your tupperware. Using your opposable thumbs will not negatively effect their re-sale value.

The refrigerator was so bad, we just got a new one. To call some of my cow-orkers pigs, would be an insult to pigs.

[Stringer]

The men's room where I work is a sty by the end of every work day. Urine all over the toilets, paper towels on the floor, water splashed all over the mirror, basin and floor. I don't understand how hard it is to throw paper towels away and use the urinals to piss.

[tdn]

Some asswipe in our department takes the tops off of muffins and leaves the stumps behind. Was this person raised in a barn?

3) Ice cubes - No ice makers for us. We use the old fashioned ice cube trays. 6 of them, usually emptied and refilled twice a day. It's not hard. You give it a twist, dump the cubes into the handy bin in the freezer, refill and place back into the freezer. Total time? 30 seconds. But someone, on finding the bin empty, plucks half the cubes out of a tray, and then leaves. Did you fail to notice that the ice cube fairy doesn't stop here? If you don't refill it, someone else doesn't get ice.
The only time I ever lived with a girlfriend, she did this all the time. I'd go to bed just after emptying and refilling the trays. When I'd get home from work the next night, There would be no ice. At all. Pissed me off, it did. So when I tried to ask her to please do it the right way, she accused me of being anal. The more insistant I got, the more she wrote it off as "typical male anal retentiveness." But fold the bathroom towels the wrong way, and whoo boy...

[tdn]

Every Friday, someone fires up the movie theatre style popcorn machine and makes popcorn.
I need to comment on this.

Anyone who has ever experienced microwave popcorn burning is well aware of the stench it leaves. It it slightly less pleasant that a combination of sour milk and raw sewage. And it doesn't stay confined. It will fill the office in moments, and it does not go away. EVAR.

But in one office where I worked, some dipshit would put a package popcorn in the microwave, set the timer for 10 minutes, and then go make phone calls. Every day.

[JerH]

Tastes - if it weren't for the popcorn machine, I'd swear that you worked in my office.

An addendum for the bathroom: how hard is it to throw your paper towels in the trash?

[cabdude]

How about the filthy, neanderthal twunt that picks his nose and wipes it on the back of the stall door whilst pinching off his morning loaf.

Dear Og! There is a ready supply of toilet paper right beside you for wiping your nose/finger with. You do NOT have to create a dried mucus pebble dash motif to admire whilst grunting out a newborn. The rest of us are NOT impressed by it.

[fireman]

My office has a restroom with two urinals and two toilets. Some lousy fucker is too lazy to lift the seat while pissing in the toilet. Don't know why he can't use the urinal to piss. If I ever catch him, I'm going to give him a swirly.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

We just got reamed out by our director because of the state our new fridge. People (and I use that term loosely) were leaving open containers of food in the fridge. Just because you keep the food cool doesn't mean it can't rot. Some of this stuff was at the evolved-high-enough-to-seek-out-its-creator stage.

One woman misread the instructions on a package and nuked her lunch for FIFTEEN MINUTES! The stench nearly sent us out of the building. The next morning, she figured a good way to get the smell out of the microwave was to boil some vinegar! Now we have burnt food smell interlaced with boiled vinegar smell.

[Jillyvn]

[QUOTE=cabdude]How about the filthy, neanderthal twunt....QUOTE]

Chiming in to say I love the word "twunt". Never heard it before, and I'd like authorization to steal it.

That being said.

No one in my current office would dare be a slob. My boss is a neat freak. Desks clear by the end of the day, no dishes in the sink etc...

Trained me up nice and good, he did, as I tend to do 7 odd jobs at once and have a desk that looks like a paper bomb exploded on it.

Office cleanliness was actually a part of my orientation :P

For those following the Newbie experience I went through in the pit, I swear one of the reasons he was let go was due to the dishes in the sink, coffee grinds, fithly desk, etc etc.

[c_goat]

I don't understand the Men's room either... same thing where I work. Water everywhere, huge globs of phlegm in the urinal, toilet seats covered in urine. I often wonder what these people's bathrooms at home look like.

Of course we have the fridge thing too... food gets pretty nasty in there, good thing I don't bring lunch ever.

We had microwave popcorn problems as well but then the company decided to not sell the packages in the candy machine anymore. Problem solved.

[cabdude]

Chiming in to say I love the word "twunt". Never heard it before, and I'd like authorization to steal it.

I would love to claim it as my own, but sadly it belongs to Roger Mellies Profanisaurus, a valuable tool for the pitter.

twunt n. Useful, satisfying yet inoffensive combination of two very rude words which can safely be spoken in primmest and properest company

[Cat Whisperer]

Don't forget the people who spit...stuff of various descriptions into the water fountains. Or dump their food leavings there. And then there's the morons who throw their lunch leavings in the recycling bins. It's always boggled my mind that at work, where you know there is nobody who is not a bona fide adult, there are always those who leave their garbage behind, leaving a mess behind, leaving water spills, coffee spills, powdered creamer spills - yes, there are usually cleaners who come at night and tidy up, but for the love of Og, can you not take a paper towel and wipe up the mess you just made?

And while we're at it, it is one of the first, unwritten rules of office etiquette that you DO NOT MICROWAVE FISH AT WORK. And leave other people's food alone. If you know it's not yours, IT'S SOMEBODY ELSE'S. And take that old shit home, too. If you haven't eaten it, toss it or take it home. Don't just let it sit in the communal fridge until it's a science project. I would love to be the Friday afternoon fridge cleaner. Everything goes. And another thing - it's nice to have a sauce or ketchup or something in the fridge, but every person in the office puts a couple sauces, a couple milk jugs, a couple juice jugs in there, and all of a sudden, there's no room for lunches.

Hmm, seem to have struck a chord with me here.

[Rubystreak]

This (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6469612&postcount=21) is why we don't have a fridge in our break room anymore. Nasty! I don't have any need of a school refrigerator (if it can't sit for 4 hours without going bad, I don't bring it to work), so I don't miss it, but it's indicative of the slobbishness of my coworkers.

[MaddyStrut]

Our biggest problem is people dumping lunch leftovers in the the breakroom sink. This sink has no disposal and the crud just piles up in the bottom strainer or makes it through the strainer then plugs up the plumbing. Several have expressed shock that the sink has no disposal. You would think the lack of, well, a disposal unit under the sink or a switch to turn it on would give it away.

Then there's the coffee area. There is sugar, artificial sweetener, and Coffeemate everywhere! You would have to work really hard to make such a mess. I can only imagine some poor department couldn't pay enough to fund a teambuilding paintball excursion so they decided to have a coffee condiments fight instead.

Before someone put a trash can by the bathroom door, we had a ton of paper towels just thrown on the floor in the bathroom area. I know many people don't like to touch the handles on the doors barehanded and used paper towels, but was there really no alternative other than to then throw your towel on the floor?

[Race Bannon]

Here's my office slob story. We have a spot where there 2 or 3 coffee makers, microwave, etc. but no sink. To dump out something you have to walk 50 feet down the hall. One coffe pot is marked for "Decaf", and usually, I'm the only one drinking it. So, at the end of the day, I'd usually clean up the Decaf pot, and leave it empty.

Often, next day, I'd come in and find it full of old, cold coffee, while a fresh pot of somebody else's coffe was brewing in another pot.

That's right, some college educated lazy ass coffee drinker would take the old dead coffee from yesterday, and DUMP IT INTO MY CLEAN POT rather than take it down the hall.

I relocated my coffee pot.

Don't mess with my coffee pot.

[Cat Whisperer]

<snip>That's right, some college educated lazy ass coffee drinker would take the old dead coffee from yesterday, and DUMP IT INTO MY CLEAN POT rather than take it down the hall.

I relocated my coffee pot.

Don't mess with my coffee pot.
You know, I'd like to say I'm surprised. {Heavy sigh}

[Kyla]

I don't drink coffee, so I've never experienced this myself, but I've learned from my coworkers that throwing away used creamer containers is extremely difficult. It's easy enough after the coffee is made, I know this because I have thrown away many used creamer containers at a time and it was pretty easy, but there must be something complicated about throwing them away at the same time you're making coffee. Not sure what it is, but it's the only possible explanation. Well...I suppose it could be that my coworkers are lazy, self-centered slobs.

Nahhh. It's really difficult.

[rexnervous]

The place I work (~40 people in an office with 1 full kitchen and 3 microwave/coffee areas, all with sinks) has sort of solved this problem thusly:

Every week two people are assigned kitchen duty. Meaning every day before they go home they are responsible for cleaning up all the kitchen-areas, running the dishwashers (and unloading) when necessary, rinsing out the coffee pots, etc.

Since everyone has to clean for a full week twice-per-year, most people are pretty mindful of not being too messy.

Seems to work.

[Sierra Indigo]

This is well too TMI, but... well, I have to share.

So I walk into the toilet at work the other day, and head for my favourite cubicle (from the door, furthest on the right. I have this thing, you see. I don't like cubicles on either side. I have to be at one end. But anyway, I digress). Open the door, turn around to close the door, turn back to the toilet, lift the lid...

BLOODY VAGINA PRINT!

Right there, on the front of the seat. A perfect outline of vulval glory. It's on a white seat, so it's not like it's hard to see. Some chick has sat, had a bleed on the seat, stood and turned to flush, put down the lid and then just left.

Eww, eww, eww. I flee to the other end of the line of stalls and carefully inspect my next choice of seating for the previous occupant's...ahem... "autograph".

That's the only time that that particular problem has ever occurred, in my experience anyway. But I do get sick of bitches pissing on the seat. Really, I doubt anyone we work with has cooties, and it's not like the general public can just waltz in and use our bathroom facilities. So the hover is completely unnecessary. Either park your heinie and tinkle in the hole, or mop it up bitch!

[MidnightRadio]

I need to comment on this.

Anyone who has ever experienced microwave popcorn burning is well aware of the stench it leaves. It it slightly less pleasant that a combination of sour milk and raw sewage. And it doesn't stay confined. It will fill the office in moments, and it does not go away. EVAR.

But in one office where I worked, some dipshit would put a package popcorn in the microwave, set the timer for 10 minutes, and then go make phone calls. Every day.In every call center I've worked in, we've had those industrial-strength microwaves that can cook a bag of popcorn in about ninety seconds instead of the five minutes recommended on the bag. And every day—every single day, at least once diring my shift—some idiot would put a bag on to cook for five minutes and it would stink the whole place up. At my current workplace, they have signs on all the microwaves telling us not to cook popcorn in them because it sets off the smoke alarms. Well, it wouldn't do that if you only cooked it for ninety seconds! Jesus, people are stupid!

[Bryan Ekers]

Why not post signs saying "POPCORN = 90 SECONDS" ?

I know it won't help, of course.

[mnemosyne]

Wow, you guys have it bad! All food where I work is stored in the fridge in the cafeteria, and at the start of the day (about 6am) the kitchen staff go to the fridges and afix little labels with the previous day's date onto any food item/container still in the fridge. If it's still there X days later (I don't know their exact rule) they just toss it, Tupperware and all. Very convenient. Coffee comes from the same places, and the washrooms are cleaned twice a day. There are advantages to working in a GMP facility.

The slobs, however, are my co-workers as they do their work. I don't know how many times I've gone to use a balance and have to wipe up mysterious powders from the area, not knowing what they are. A simple buffer salt? A Category 3 active ingredient? who knows? But there it is, all over the counter. Some people are nice enough to put down paper towels to catch the spillings, then leave the paper towels next to the balances. People tuck bottles of things all over the place so they don't have to look for them later...I recently found a large drum of active ingredient (pure drug product) sitting in a cupboad. The expiration date was 2 years ago. It was next to a loosely capped bottle of acetonitrle (which, at least, seemed recent). Yay! fumes! The manufacturing and packaging people are actually less at risk, because they don't have the idiots thinking to themselves "well, it's just a couple of grams, it won't hurt anyone!"

While coffee spillings next to the sink are nasty, I sometimes think I'd rather deal with that than with potential exposure to high-potency active ingredients in the early enough stages of development that no one really knows what the hell it will do to you.
*sigh*

[MidnightRadio]

Why not post signs saying "POPCORN = 90 SECONDS" ?

I know it won't help, of course.No, I doubt very much that it would help, which is why I imagine they just banned popcorn.

[ParentalAdvisory]

BLOODY VAGINA PRINT!

Band name?

[soulmurk]

Until a new (and hopefully soon to be old) employee started working at my company, the worst of the problems was the aforementioned pee dribblings on the toilet seat and the paper towels on the floor. It's a manly shop full of manly men, so you can imagine how often it gets cleaned to begin with.

Since the aforementioned employee has begun working there, I have had the pleasure of discovering many of the results of his oral fixation: sunflower seed shells spit all over the shop floor; cigarette butts (which aren't even allowed to be smoked inside) stamped out and smeared across the shop floor; and perhaps most disgustingly, soda bottle spittoons, with no top, filled nearly halfway with saliva and chewing tobacco juice, and typically tucked behind something so as not to be found for several days.

In a sort of related note, since his hiring, sodas, energy drinks, gatorades, and even whole lunches have begun disappearing out of the fridge.

My most previous office job had several popcorn burners too. Hate that smell.

[Cheesesteak]

If it's still there X days later (I don't know their exact rule) they just toss it, Tupperware and all. Very convenient. If I ran an office, I'd have a rule like this. If your old rotten food is clogging up the fridge, out it goes. Perhaps I'd put up a list of acceptable "weekend storage" items, like milk, canned drinks, etc. Everything else gets tossed Friday @ 5pm.

[Cat Whisperer]

Yup. I worked at a place like that. We won't even get into the fight I got into with a guy who left his leftover lunches repeatedly and for so long that they were fuzzy, basically being the cause of the new "Everything tossed on Friday afternoon" rule, then wanted his Tupperware back when I took it out of the garbage, took it home and bleached it, and started using it for myself. (I was poor and it was good Tupperware, okay? A little bleach and it was good as new.)

[BiblioCat]

Popcorn burners are the worst. They should be flogged. Repeatedly.
I don't even like popcorn, and I especially hate that smell.

Of course, I used to work with a girl who would make popcorn everyday. The microwave in our kitchenette didn't have the turntable anymore, so you had to set stuff off to the side a little, so it wasn't touching the knob for the turntable in the middle of the oven. She was completely oblivious - she'd put the popcorn bag right in the middle, set the timer for 10 minutes and wander away. She'd wander back 15 or 20 minutes later to get it and always wonder why it was all scorched. Then she'd start all over again with a fresh bag.

More than once I (or someone else who was nearby) would pull her smoking popcorn bag out of the microwave, throw it in the sink to douse it with water and then threw it away.
That, of course, would set her off. "Why did you throw away my popcorn? It was fine!"
Yeah, a smoking bag of popcorn is 'fine.' :rolleyes:
That horrible smell would permeate the entire are where I sat. It's just gross.

[Mama Tiger]

Last office I worked in, mandatory common space cleanliness (and end-of-day desk cleanliness) was also part of the orientation. And uniformly enforced by our office manager. Even the firm partners had better not leave any kind of mess in the kitchen, and anyone who went in at any time and found something out of place was under orders to clean it up immediately. Food in the fridge was supposed to be labeled by date when put in, and every other Friday a notice was sent out to either make sure it was claimed and labeled with an expiration date or it would be tossed.

I don't think I ever found so much as a dusting of coffee sugar on the counters, and there was always fresh coffee because everyone was trained to make new immediately. (The one time someone didn't, my boss came in and fired off a firmwide nasty email, to which he was greated with joking along the lines of, "Oooh, he's sure grumpy when he doesn't have his coffee, isn't he?" -- but it also didn't happen again.)

of course, it probably helped to know that non-partners could be fired for messiness, and partners could have their lives made a living hell by office manager (billings not prepared timely, checks not signed timely, etc.) if they didn't comply, too. But since they'd hired her, they followed her rules with no argument.

Oh, and the last four offices I've worked in had a "no popcorn during normal business hours" rule, both to prevent burnt popcorn smell and to avoid non-burnt popcorn smell, which can be unbelievably distracting. Especially when it's someone in the office on the next floor making it and it seeps through the air vents and there's nothing you can do about it but get hungrier and hungrier. :(

It's really not that hard. All it takes is one person in authority with some backbone.