My co-worker emptied out the gift basket today and asked if anyone wanted it before it was thrown out. No competition as someone took it. All good.
But there’s always that one person who’ll take anything, usually calling out for it first and loudly. Whether it’s an empty gift basket or a bag of stale donuts…“I’ll take it!”
It’s usually fine with me, because the’re rarely anything I want from the office, but it really irritates me when it’s something someone else can use, “My sister’s a teacher and can use those empty calculator rolls for projects”, but I’ll take it guy or gal calls dibs saying, “I don’t know what, but I’ll find a use for it.” :dubious: Even worse is when they take things that would be good for kids and “I’ll take it” has no kids or even worse says, I can sell this on Craigslist. :mad:
Related pet peeve. Says they will take it and then leaves it on their desk for the next 1.5 years and doesn’t even take it when they leave the company.
My gf works in advertising. Every couple of weeks they’ll have a big meeting in the morning which is catered; coffee, tea, juices, a fruit platter, and bagels. There are always bagels left over that eventually go stale. My gf would bring the stale bagels home and give them to our chickens. She took pictures of the chickens feasting on the stale bagels, and her coworkers became enthralled, insisting she take the bagels home for the hens.
I didn’t know any of that background. One day I noticed a box of bagels in the garage by my gf’s car. I assumed they were leftovers from her job, took them upstairs, and ate them over the next few days, taking some to work with me to share. My gf is very carb-conscious, so I wasn’t surprised that she never ate any.
A few weeks later another box of bagels showed up in the garage. Again, I ate some and took some to work with me. Rinse/repeat for several years.
One weekend morning she noticed me eating a bagel for breakfast. She said it looked good and asked me where I bought them. I told her they were the ones she brought home from work every so often.
She was shocked. For years she’d assumed I knew they were chicken bagels and was feeding them to the hens. Because of this, she threw any uneaten bagels, even those that had been handled by coworkers or fallen on the floor, into her “chicken box”.
Communication, so important in a relationship, or not.
When we have gift baskets or cookie tins and similar items, we raffle them off to interested people when they are empty, never had a problem there. My pet peeve are empty paper boxes. We go through several cases of paper a month and there is always a couple of people that want them. I have taken some home myself on occasion, as they do come in handy for various things. The have become so popular that we have a rotation list of who gets the next empty box. Whenever someone empties a box, they check the list and put the persons name on a post it note and set it by the door to the office. The way our scheduling works, the longest it should sit by the door is 3 days before any single person is back to work and can take the box home with them. Some people will let them sit there for weeks! Emails, face to face reminders, offers to carry them to their cars for them, and yet they sit there. I finally got tired of it and will now change the name to the next person on the list after a week. (I should mention that I am in management, so it’s not just someone going rogue and making up new rules).
You can imagine the reaction, or maybe you can’t. The first time I did this, (after a face to face reminder and what was going to happen as well as an email to everyone in the office), you would have thought that I went to this persons house, took everything not bolted down, including the family gold fish!
Any food we get in the store is put on the table or counter if it’s up for grabs, and in the frig or your locker if it’s not. Items for giving away are put in a special shopping cart, and you must ask permission before taking anything.
It helps that there are cameras running at all times.
Great stories, especially kayaker - you must have built up an excellent immune system!
In our office, I think I’m that guy - but I don’t actively shout for it, just people know I’m the team dustbin, so any unwanted food tends to make its way to me before going in the bin. I wouldn’t take stuff I didn’t want, or that other people might like.
Yeah, good story, kayaker!
I don’t usually take stuff because I don’t care enough to fight for it, but one time we had ordered a floor mat with our logo on it and got somebody else’s order by mistake. It was a really ugly square mat with some bizarre logo on it. The company said we could keep it, and bam! I was on that like white on rice (to everyone else’s relief, I’m sure). When you have four muddy-feeted dogs at home, there are never enough floor mats.
I just remembered another big score I got at work. They were remodeling the lab, and when they tore out a big section of workbench, we rescued it from the trash. Now we have some good cabinets installed in our garage.
Paper boxes have nice lids! Why go to WallyWorld and buy storage containers for your crap when you can score a paper box at work?
I’ve actually used the work environment to get RID of stuff! Leftover cookies or cake from a holiday, don’t keep those calories around the house! Haul it to work, set it on the table in the breakroom, and it vanishes!
~VOW
Miss ‘I’ll take it’ here. I loves me a freebie. But if you need it I’ll give it to you. I especially liked the glass gallon jars we used to get in the concession stand. I made all my girls and friends canister sets out of them.
I like milk crates from the school. I have dozens.
Office boxes are a particular favorite. I have many things stored in them.
Mr.Wrekker saves all his cigar boxes for me.
Shut-up!
I am not a hoarder.
Yesterday I finally broke down and bought some items at the store where I work. I absolutely hate shopping. I hate it with a passion that is never ending, simply because shopping is so never ending… One reason I work in a store is so I don’t have to go shopping…
I had a big plastic bag. As I went to take the garbage out, I noticed a big reusable bag from another store sitting on top. Okay, I took it.
My place is a store, so no desks or cubicles to speak of. Mostly high school and college aged kids. However, we get the same thing here. For the vast majority of things, I don’t ask, I just throw them away. The problem is, like has been mentioned upthread, I’ll be getting rid of, for example, a plastic fishbowl shaped thing that was full of candy and someone will inevitably say they want it. The problem is, they don’t actually want it, they just think they do. This is shown to be true because it’ll end up getting shuffled around the back room for a few days before the person decides they don’t want it anymore.
My solution, besides just throwing things out instead of asking if anyone wants it, is that if someone does say they want something, I’ll hand it to them and ask them to run it out to their car.* I’d say that probably 80% of the time, their response is ‘nevermind, you can throw it out’…yeah, that’s what I thought.
I’d rather just throw it out now instead of throwing it out in a week or a month or a year when it’s still back here and then having them get mad because they were going to take it home.
*It’s a small place, you can walk to your car and back to where you’re standing right now in less than a minute. It’s not like they’re taking stairways or going to a parking garage. So it’s not that it’s some huge inconvenience or hardship.
The entire nation of Egypt was the “I’ll take it” person, which works for me as I myself am the thrifty I’ll-repurpose-this-somehow type. It also made it extremely easy to get rid of anything I didn’t want, without the hassle of figuring out how to dispose of it.
When I lived in Cairo, there was a collective of Americans that together bought in bulk US grocery items not available on the open market in Egypt. The only problem was that the minimum order of any item was an absurd amount: if you couldn’t find anyone to share your 20 super-large jars of Welch’s grape jam with, you ended up with way too much jam.
I solved the problem by putting excess, aging jars nicely arranged on my bookshelf and inviting Egyptian friends over. Except I never had to invite more than one person, because whoever it was would take EVERYTHING, like 10 jars of jam at a time, even after I warned them, “I bought this last year and if it isn’t already expired it will be very soon.”
Another person in the collective must not have had any Egyptian friends, because she was famous for trying to give us all disgusting jars of expired marshmallow creme. Now, I’m no purist when it comes to using expired food; my waste-not-want-not mentality usually overcomes any other concerns. But this stuff was beyond repellent. It was so old that all the ingredients had separated and there was a nasty yellowish liquid sloshing atop a sullen-looking glob of white.
The Americans would have swap meets a few days after each shipment came in, and she was always there hawking the same jars, which became progressively nastier looking as the yellowish liquid turned a grayish green and the white stuff became more immobile.
It was a marvel to the rest of us that she couldn’t bring herself to throw out the damn stuff. I also figured this woman had no Egyptian friends, or it would have disappeared years earlier, hopefully when it was still edible-looking. No matter that whoever she offered it to might never have seen marshmallow creme before. It would have been GONE.
Coffee cans. I got into a kick of making my own mixes, and coffee cans are a nice way of storing them.
Unless you don’t fill them immediately upon bringing them home. Then, a husband or son will encounter the pile of empty coffee cans (WITH lids!), and said person will have an internal dialog with himself and and come to the conclusion that since HE didn’t need them, they were trash.
That happened on at least three different occasions.
Said husband and said son were notorious for keeping their own generated trash, so I’m forever puzzled as to why they only exhibit cleaning notions when encountering MY STUFF.
There’s a guy at work who will bring one peanut butter sandwich and a carrot stick for lunch. But put him in front of some free food…he’ll eat four sandwiches and a bunch of sides and then he’ll wrap up another four sandwiches to take home with him. I think he grew up pretty poor, so waste not want not.
I’m not the I’ll take it person, but I’ve been the recipient of some darn nice “please take it tables” at other people’s places of business. (Generally, my “I’ll take it” opportunities have been really old IT equipment and vendor swag - and I really don’t need an Oracle coffee cup or six year old laptop). My husband would get media freebies from his job - we ended up with a huge early 2000s anime DVD collection from the “please take it” table since he was one of the few that liked anime and his coworkers would grab them for him when they saw them - but I also ended up with a lot of other strange DVDs during that time (and a few video games or CDs). A friend works for a beauty magazine, and would show up with freebies - lipstick, nail polish, eye shadow, jewelry - and sometimes clothes (although they tend to be tiny - they benefited my youngest for a while) from the “please get rid of this” table. My mother in law worked in publishing 20 years ago, plenty of books would show up.
(And copy paper boxes are awesome - its one of the things I miss about not working in corporate America any longer)
I think I am that guy. I find it nearly impossible to turn down free food. And yes, if there are leftovers after an office lunch, I will bring some home for dinner. While I grew up solidly middle class, both of my parents were fairly poor when they were growing up, so I think they passed their frugal habits on to me. Actually my mom is worse. If we go out to a restaurant and they serve a basket of bread before the meal, she will wrap up any uneaten bread and the little butter packets, and put them in her purse to take home.
