- Buy a bottle of apple juice.
- Mark it with your name.
- Drink most of it.
- Pee into the bottle and stir gently.
- Place in communal fridge.
We have a general rule at work- if it’s on the table, and left on the table, especially with a label saying “Brownies! Have some!” or whatever, it’s for everyone. No one touches anyone’s food if it’s in the fridge. That’s insane.
Who in hell would take a bite, re-wrap it, and stick it back in the container? I say you start shooting people until someone confesses. Or they’re all maimed. Don’t shoot to kill- just go for the kneecaps.
Sounds good as revenge, but this is illegal in many places. Just like Ex-Lax brownies.
Where my sweetie used to work, there was a rash of lunch thefts. Sure, those who didn’t have lunch were angry but much wasn’t done about the situation. It was so weird too. Some sandwiches, for example, would have a bite out of the middle, off of the side, the meat taken out, bites taken and then put back. Sometimes the whole sandwich was gone too. Og knows what was done to non sandwich type food. One day during the reign of terror, the president of the company had a pie in the fridge. It was stolen. You’d have thought the crown jewels and Fort Knox had been liberated at the same time by a cool comic book style master criminal. The thief was never caught, but after that all lunches (and pies) were safe.
At one job, a woman would bring in a 2 liter bottle of soda to keep in the fridge. She wrote her name on it to prevent pilfering. Another guy who worked there was a major asshole. He would always feel free to help himself. Since he was one of several people there sleeping with the slut boss, there wasn’t anything the woman could do about it. So she mixed in a healthy amount of used coffee grounds. After he got through choking, he stopped stealing her soda.
At another job, there was a rash of lunch thefts. People were getting pretty upset, and the boss asked me to do something about it. WTF? Am I the sandwich police? Well, I sent out an e-mail saying that I would be randomly bringing food laced with very strong laxatives and placing it in the fridge. We’ll know who is doing this by who gets rushed to the hospital. I never actually did it, but the threat did its job.
How illegal is it if you were to bake some Ex-Lax brownies, label it “DO NOT TOUCH!!!” and then leave it in the fridge. Ample warning that the brownies are not to be touched, but if they eat it anyway, shouldn’t the onus be on them to take responsibility for their actions. Didn’t their mothers teach them not to put whatever they find in their mouthes? :dubious:
And went on to market Coca-Cola Blak.
Damn straight!
(But lay off my chicken salad or I’ll poop in your cubicle.)
That’s not how it worked at that job. If there was food up for grabs, an email would go out such as “there’s pizza in the kitchen, yours if you want it!” Or a note taped to the box: “help yourself!”
Not so in this situation. The thing was still warm. And she had her own lunch!
And if she had bothered to put any effort at all into finding out if she could have some, my office was right across the hall from the kitchen. If she had stood in the kitchen doorway and asked if I knew whose pizza it was, I would have told her.
Nah. “Ooh, food! I think I’ll help myself to some!”
Damn scavengers.
I’m lucky to be in a food secure office (although one cow-orker I pitted a while back hasn’t paid up for tea and biscuit money since Dec 05). Any up for grabs food is designated such, otherwise its all left to the owner.
Better idea:
- Buy a bottle of apple juice and some bottles of Cel-Ray.
- Mark the apple juice bottle with your name.
- Drink all of it.
- Open the Cel-Ray, let it go flat, and fill the apple juice bottle with it.
- Place in communal fridge.
At our office generally there are no food stealers, with the occasional mistaken lunch identity incident. Our problem is getting people to own up to and take responsibility for what is theirs. For example, another coworker and I often get sick of the full and smelly fridge first, and clean it out. There are things that have clearly just been rotting there for weeks or months. WTF?
The milk/half and half/creamer situation is kind of strange, though. There are some people who hoard theirs and even clip the containers shut. Then there is a whole subculture who just bring in something and let everyone share.
I mean, you could be consuming Ex-lax brownies yourself. I don’t see how it could be illegal.
I don’t get this, either, but at my building the refrigerators were always perpetually choked with expired foodstuffs. It got so bad, and people were so resistant to throwing anything away, that now on the last Friday of every month at 4pm the building managers go around and throw away everything in the refrigerator. Food, drink, lunchboxes, marked containers, unmarked containers – if it’s in there, it’s gone.
This is stupid and a bad idea.
You put the name of the coworker everyone hates on it.
I would have gotten very angry and demanded that she pay for it. She ate it after all. Tell her you refuse her offer of some stinkin’ salad that obviously wasn’t good enough for her to eat - why would you want it? YOU DEMAND PIZZA!
Fortunately, I’ve never had this problem; we had fridges in the school common room and everything was labelled. If it was to be communal, you left it on the bench unnamed. If someone wanted to nick your Milo, they’d ask first!
A better idea — add lots of blue food dye to a bottle of apple juice. If anybody drinks it, even if you don’t see them do it, you’ll know — their mouth will be bright blue for hours.
Or add something that turns their pee blue and hear them complain. My grandfather fed some kidney medication to his neighbour’s greyhounds to hear him complain to his father. Worth it, it would seem, for the whack he got afterwards 
I still don’t understand what is illegal about putting laxatives in your own personal brownies and labeling them with your name to prevent them from being mistaken for someone elses.
We’ve had the opposite problem in my office. My officemates and I have a dorm-sized fridge, which keeps us from having to use the skanky big fridge in the nearest kitchen. Occasionally, someone will leave stuff in our fridge. Once it was alcohol, which is strictly forbidden at work and by the dictates of our lease. I had to send an email out asking the owner to come and claim it, because neither one of us felt like getting blamed for that.