At work (er, you know Intergalactic Gladiator work…) we have bagels and donuts once a week. In addition to bagels and donuts, we get a few other baked treats to enjoy in the morning. My favorite is the smiley face cookie. I love that thing.
I’m not the only coworker here who likes this cookie as the box is emptied every week whereas some boxes have stray bagels or muffins at the end of the day.
The most curious thing about this though is that some people come in and break a cookie into pieces and just take a part, leaving the rest a broken, smiling shell of its former cookie glory.
Why?
Yes I understand that perhaps these cookie consumers are trying to cut calories as they’re chomping and chewing this confection (which actually seems silly to me. It’s the morning, you have all day to work those calories off, maybe don’t eat that bag of chips for lunch or something), but why are people breaking multiple cookies and leaving multiple pieces behind instead of taking what is already broken? Why does the box look like some kind of smiley face Gettysburg every single week?
If you take a cookie that is already broken, it is evident that someone has touched the cookie. If you take a whole cookie and break it yourself, you can preserve your own delusion that the cookie is sterile and pure, and no one but you has ever breathed on it or ever even cast his eyes upon it. And you alone can control the percentage of the cookie consumed, so if the previous cookie-breaker has left 57% of the cookie, but you want 54% of the cookie, you must either bring a scalpel and micrometer or break your own cookie and achieve satisfaction.
I’ll break cookies and crackers apart on a plate or a napkin so that the crumbs stay there instead of getting onto my shirt. Now, why someone might do this in the box is beyond me. Perhaps they just wanted a bite as they strolled by rather than a whole portion.
Do the cookies come in one of those plastic boxes with slots that make all the cookies stand vertically? It could just be that nobody wants to pry out a cookie shard from the pocket.
Breaking a fresh 200 calorie cookie tells your coworkers “I just saved 100 calories.” Eating half of an already broken cookie sends the signal that you ate a treat earlier, then came back to add 100 calories on to your already broken diet.
There is a fable about a dog in a manger. The people who take slivers of cookies don’t really want the cookie (otherwise, they would take the whole cookie), but they also don’t want anybody else to enjoy something they have decided to deny themselves. Oh sure, they leave the rest of the cookie in the box so someone else can enjoy their leave-behinds. But nobody ever takes a pre-mangled cookie, and everybody knows that.
Maybe you could ask them, sweetly, “Please don’t be an animal and leave your half-eaten food mixed in with the other pastries. Thanks!”
In my old office, full of sane people, people broke cookies on purpose if they came in a variety pack, so that more people could get a piece of the yummiest kind. Never saw any reticence about taking already-broken pieces. Rarely saw any reticence about finishing things off, either, which I understand is unusual.
You think it’s giving you the stink eye, but I say it’s a little sweet on you.
That’s a good theory but the only hole in it is that people do take the mangled cookies. All of those cookie parts get eaten. I’ve even put a few down myself to put them out of their misery.
What’s funny is that I’ll sit down with my mother-in-law, who has a box of cookies that she baked earlier. She’ll break a cookie, and eat half of it, figuring that she’ll pace herself. I on the other hand, will pick out the broken pieces, and eat them, which makes my MIL lose track of how many she’s had. Then neither of us have any guilt for eating any (half cookies don’t count).
I’d be surprised if it isn’t possible to buy pre-broken cookies from some sources. This purchasing strategy offers several advantages the existing system lacks, like so:
(1) The cookies are probably broken in an environment governed by some kind of public health act, hence they should not have been subjected to manhandling by hordes of unwashed employees (no offence).
(2) Cookies broken randomly by third parties offer an excellent choice of size. This choice increases in line with the number of original whole cookies, so buy very large bags. Jumbo size, if at all possible. Given such a wide range of sizes and shapes, I will hazard a guess that even the most discerning cookie piece eater, size-wise, will be able to tell 54% from 57% of a whole cookie. As long as everybody knows the exact size of a whole cookie, obviously.
(3) Pre-broken cookies being substantially cheaper than whole cookies, the Cookie-Buying Division of Intergalactic Gladiators Inc. will make significant cost savings over current expenditure. This will permit the company to invest more financial resources in Intergalactic Gladiator’s pay rise for coming up with such a brilliant idea.
I would always see this in my office with the bagels and donuts also. Once it got down to 2 or 3 left, the partitioning would really take off. Nobody wanted to take the last one, or the second to last one, etc. And some people have an aversion to taking a whole portion (diet, looking piggy, etc.) It gets to be a study in fractions as everyone just takes one third of whatever piece is left, with ever diminishing slices.
Being the rebel that I am, if I happened to stroll by and see a one & one-eighth inch piece left I would just pick it up and pop it into my mouth. I’m sure it’s one of the reasons I wasn’t promoted.
From your picture, it looks like a pretty big cookie. I could see only wanting to eat half of it. I reminds me of this enormous 120 calorie “healthy” cookie I bought once. Sounded good until you looked at the nutritional label: Serving size - 3. :eek:
One more unmentioned possibility: if you take 54% of the Happy Cookie, you feel marginally less bad about also scarfing down 100% of the chocolate donut as well. Mmm…variety!
My suspicion is it’s related to pickle etiquette. With all of the roommates I have ever had, not one has ever had the courage to eat the last pickle. A single lonely pickle will sit in an enormous empty jar at the back of the refrigerator for months or years, alongside the jar that contains a single olive, the mustard container which contains a half a squirt, and the ancient bag of raisin bread which contains one and only one slice.
The idea, I think, it that as long as you don’t eat the last one, it doesn’t count. You feel no moral need to replace it, since “there’s still some left.” No one needs to be compensated, no guilt need be experienced. They probably snap off a piece of cookie with the half-conscious thought that they haven’t really eaten the cookie since – look! – it’s still (mostly) there. Evidence to support this would be that the portion broken off is always smaller than half. This would also explain why people don’t want to break off a piece of an already broken cookie: as long as they’re taking less than half a cookie, they need not feel that they’ve eaten a cookie.
