The problem with that sign was many peoples moms did work there. It was a factory in a small town. The place has to close for funerals sometimes.
I don’t like the “your mother doesn’t work here.” It seems to imply that mothers legitimately clean up after their grown children. Ummm, not in my world.
A lot of HR people and office managers put up these signs. Personally, I think the all caps, underlining and exclamation points are a verbal tic people use when they have no power but are desperately trying to convey authority. I find it kind of sad. If you could put “Any questions, see me, Jim Smith CEO” at the bottom, you wouldn’t need that kind of typographical authoritarianism.
The way I see it, it is a mostly ineffective solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place (anyone old enough to work should know that they need to clean up after themselves), but it seems to be the best we’ve got.
By the way, I love working at companies that dump everything out of the fridge Friday afternoon. That rocks my world. Some places I’ve worked at had fridges so packed full of old shit that you couldn’t squeeze your sandwich in. Not that you really want to, after taking a look at the mess in there.
I saw a story of one office that had a chronic food thief. One day, a slice of pizza is laced with special mushrooms, wrapped and put in the office fridge. Didn’t take long before the thief was jumping up on the desk screaming that the telephone was trying to kill him. :wally :eek:
He never worked there again, but probably remembers nothing and didn’t learn anything from it.
There’s also the Dilbert strip that’s taped to one of our fridges with the tagline taped to a fridge: “Note to food thief - that wasn’t pudding”
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Just had to click in here when I saw the OP’s user name. I live and die for Eleanor. Ever read A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver? Introduced me to the Plantagenets when I was about 10 and I’ve never looked back.
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Hi Twiddle! No, I’ve never heard of that one, I’ll look for it. I had just finished reading one of Sharon Kay Penman’s books about Eleanor when I signed up. 
I love the Plantagenets and the Tudors.
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We have food thieves at my workplace and one of the cheesy bastards stole my sandwich–it was a couple of days before payday so I had zero cash and no real alternatives, so I went hungry that day. I posted a big old sign that read “To the jerk who stole my sandwich: I know about people like you, so every time I make my lunch I spit on my food. It doesn’t bother me to eat my own spit, and I must say it makes it a lot easier on me to know you ate it too. Bon appetit, schmuck!” We’ve also tossed around the idea of taking up a collection to buy bait food that’s been impregnated with various noxious substances to make the thief ill but we’re all too cheap to do it. My aunt, though, once foiled the office orange juice thief by putting a large amount of alum in the bottle. Made the culprit REAL easy to spot, and the offense was never repeated!
In my area at my old workplace, my group of 7 employees got together and bought a dorm fridge just for us. We didn’t have to worry about people stealing our food and we kept it clean ourselves. The only problem we had was people from other areas wanting to store stuff there. We rarely allowed it - usually only when there was a communal food day and not enough space in the main fridge.
StG
I think the implication is that people who don’t clean up after themselves are acting childish.
What does alum do to you when you consume it?
Layman’s explanation: Alum shrinks tissue, I understand that it makes your lips pucker like a cartoon character who has eaten a lemon.
Ahh, it is an astringent, isn’t it? Okay, makes sense. Would that effect really be enough to be obvious, though?
A large amount? Did it kill the poor guy? I mean, he was a food thief, sure, but death?
Was he really easy to spot because he was a corpse? :eek:
(Tongue in cheek, I’m not accusing the poster of lying, I’m laughing too hard at this morbid image in my head.)
And I should have quoted SmartAleq, apologies Excalibre. :smack:
Where I work, the people who got most offended by the signs are the ones who leave the messes. No one really complains about the signs because of that and no one ever knows who leaves the messes.
I’m a curmudgeon. Every place I’ve worked has had nothing but problems with break rooms, refrigerators, microwaves, and coffee makers, except for one, where it was part of the janitor’s job to keep everything clean.
If I owned a business, the break room would have tables, comfy chairs, windows, magazines, cool art on the walls, and fresh flowers every day. Bring your sandwich in a little cooler bag, your coffee in a thermos, and enjoy your lunch.
If I owned a business, my break room would be a lot like yours, AuntiePam, except I would include a fridge, just for the pleasure of tossing all the garbage out of it every Friday afternoon. And ignoring the bitching and moaning when people’s good Tupperware goes out, after them seeing the sign on the fridge every day stating emphatically that EVERYTHING GOES EVERY FRIDAY!!!
I wouldn’t have any coffee making supplies, since I don’t drink coffee and coffee makers and drinkers are some of the worst offenders for messing up a break room. Everybody knows where the nearest Tim Horton’s is.
I would think you’d make a face at the unpleasant sensation at the least. Note I didn’t say your mouth would shrink, just that your lips would pucker as though eating something sour. Or maybe, they meant that they were easy to spot due to the emetic effects which drinking so much had caused?
Let’s agree that the best prevention is not stealing other folks’ orange juice. Seriously, what the fuck is going through the mind of a person who does that? I just don’t understand that kind of casual thievery at all - but apparently, lots of otherwise-normal folks do.
Naw, the guy didn’t die but he did pucker up, drooled a bunch and threw up for the rest of the afternoon. If it helps any, this was back when I was a kid and my aunt used alum because she knew it tasted nasty from having sampled some accidentally when her mom was making pickles–I doubt she had any idea it could be harmful, after all it was sold as a food additive. I think she just wanted to get it across to this jerk that drinking all her orange juice was not a nice thing to do. What I don’t understand, having tasted the stuff myself, was how in hell anyone could possibly drink enough to cause serious harm–we’re talking a VERY unpleasant taste here.