So that’s where my slimy furfruit have been going! I thought someone was stealing them.
Let’s leave the issue of whether boobie-trapping food is illegal or immoral for the moment. Is it effective?
I’ve had occasion to use laxatives several times in my life. I took some just 30 minutes ago. There was even a time when I went to the OR for severe abdominal pain, when it turned out I was merely full of shit (and a kidney stone).
In my experience, laxatives don’t cause a sudden irreversible torrent of diarrhea. They merely loosen things up to a manageable level. I have serious doubts that spiking foods in such a way would cause anyone to notice, much less change a thieving behavior. They probably would not even link such a behavior to the slight change in bowel conditions.
Then again, to argue against my own point, I’ve learned to never follow a meal at a Japanese/Korean restaurant with a show. Such meals are best followed with 3-6 hours in the intimate company of a toilet.
I just took some stool softeners, with a kim chi chaser. Gotta go. :eek:
Yes, but the morning prior to the removal-of-all-things-furry we send out a reminder email to “label any questionable goods” and we don’t throw out your Tupperware. The Unauthorized Night Time Cleanout is taking Tupperware and insulated lunch bags away too.
The deadline is usually 3pm. So if you’ve got furry fruit, you better label it over the lunch hour. I’ve seen nasty-looking spaghetti saue (possibly spaghettie sauce, it wasn’t really identifiable by then) labelled with a date and “Please don’t throw out.” :eek: I hope no one actually ate that!
I guess it depends. When I was in high school some friends put two laxatives (not sure what brand) in my food. They told me right after. I was perfectly fine for around three hours, but after that good lord! It felt like somebody just unzipped my instestines or something. I was on the pot all night and somewhat the day after. It was not fun, though I did get revenge by doing the worst damage in my friend’s toilet.
This is where there seems to be a communication break down. Our lease says we are responsible for taking care of the fridge, the diswasher, coffee machine, toaster, and microwave. The cleaning staff will not clean those.
But I’m inclined to think the best of people, and I just don’t see the cleaning staff swiping food with intent. However, there have been serious security issues. About two weeks after our office moved in, there was a serious case of outright burglary. Our office lost laptops, projectors and other small, expensive electronics. The other tenants were much harder hit. There’s an ad agency so they had a lot more of these small, expensive electronics. Police believe it was an inside job. (Note: Our passcards don’t work for the other tenants’ offices and vice versa).
There had been workers on one floor, but they had limited access. So the police interviewed security and the cleaning staff. Nothing came of it.
Is St. Lawrence Market in Toronto? What language would the cleaning crew speak?
GoLightly?
Toronto is one of the world’s most multi-cultural cities. We are in second place for cities with the largest percentage of foreign-born residents. In 2001, the demographics had it that 43.7% of Torontonians were foreign born. English is the predominant language of only 51.8% of the population here. Chinese is spoken by over 300,000.
I think a good chunk of the cleaning crew is Latin American, and I think a couple are Filipino. They really don’t speak English very well. At our old office, Anthony and his crew were Portugese.
A) Office cleaning is one of those job often done by immigrants. Given that there’s little interaction with the public, it’s often done especially by those not fluent in the local language.
B) A lot of immigrants pick up spoken language more quickly than written language. Most especially if it’s in a different alphabet.
I was once sent to one of those intensive language classes in Russian. The instruction was totally oral, spoken give and take with the teacher. At the end I could more or less muddle through pleasantries and low level conversations, but I didn’t know the written alphabet at all.
Thank you. I don’t know much about Canadian immigrants, other than that there is a large Asian community in Vancouver.
If they don’t commonly steal electronics, rig up a laptop and camera and fill up the hard drive one weekend. You may not be able to identify an individual, but you could probably tell the difference between security v. cleaning crew.
Edit: and if the laptop is stolen, the management might take more of an interest.
Or if the door into the kitchen is in view of a desk-based PC, you could set up a webcam on that. Catspy is an excellent program for this purpose, as it is motion-triggered and can be set to start recording from a few seconds before the motion is detected (no, really, it can).
Then all you need to do is bait the fridge with something that will be conspicuously visible when carried out of the door - a cold pizza in a big box perhaps.
I don’t suppose any of the people throwing around the “it’s illegal” claim have a cite that in the State the OP resides in, it is illegal to put laxative in your own food and put it in a refrigerator? Even with the suspicion that it might be stolen? In fact, since the OP’s State isn’t mentioned anywhere I can see, how did people arrive at this legal analysis? Was there a past thread on this somewhere?
Note I said “illegal”, not “actionable”. You can sue anyone over almost anything, blah, blah.
~
As to the cleaning crew, hell yes I’d suspect them. My company was terrorized for more than a decade by a cleaning crew who willfully stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, and which had no possible way of being punished. This was tolerated because the cleaning service company was owned by a relative of one of the upper management, and so over the years everything from an apple left out overnight to calculators and briefcases were being routinely stolen. Since in my early days at work it was not uncommon for folks to be working around the clock to meet deadlines, on at least two occasions one of my co-workers caught one of the cleaning crew red-handed stealing from people’s cubicles - and after reporting them, was dressed down for being a “vigilante” (the only thing he did was file a report!) and the cleaning crew person was not fired - because somehow, it was much better to let a $7/hour untrained worker who openly stole items keep their job, as opposed to a $50/hour engineer who was being stolen from…
Eventually, the cleaning crew company was fired when they went on a “rampage” one month and were stealing entire PCs, just grabbing the whole things off of desks and walking out with them. After something like 30 PCs were taken in one month, and after the police caught the cleaning crew selling the fucking stolen PCs out of a van in the parking lot of the building where they stole them from, they finally got a new service.
The new cleaning crew is above reproach in terms of theft. If you leave a penny on the floor, they vacuum around it. However, the flip side of the situation is they don’t seem to do much in the way of actual cleaning, and tend to spend a large portion of their time down in the cafeteria listening to Spanish radio stations at 120dB and playing cards.
I guess that’s OK, as long as they’re not stealing, right?
No problem. It’s one of the marvelous things about living in Toronto: an enormous wealth of different cultural experiences available right in your back yard. (And amazing places to eat!)
Working at O&G in the high-rises downtown here, I noticed that the notes left for cleaning crews would be in four or so languages (I think the cleaning crews here are mostly Indian/Pakistani/Philipino, and possibly Eastern European).
I love the PNW, but I miss Little Saigon, loads of Mexican restaruants, cheap Thai food… Still, Vancouver is only 35 miles away.
I’m in Toronto, so that would be Ontario law. The only real law I know about that deals with booby-traps has to do with increased charges for marijuana grow ops which are often booby-trapped.
There are Canadian laws about “administering a noxious substance”. For example, a nurse was charged for putting some kind of sedatives in her co-workers’ food which made them mildly ill, some teens were charged under that law after throwing a cup of feces at some donut shop employees, and a teen was charged for a prank invovling dog repellent at school.
In any case, I find the concept of booby trapping my food makes me rather uncomfortable.
If I was to mix up a drug mousse and leave it in a communial fridge, and someone was to eat that mousse and be injured thereby, there are at least three possible ways I might get legal grief:
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I may be found guilty of assault by poisioning;
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I may be found guilty of criminal negligence in causing a poisioning; and
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I may be sued civily for negligence causing poisioning.
The issue in the first case would be intent. Did I, in putting my doctored food out, do so with the deliberate intention to cause injury to another? To be guilty, the prosecution would have to prove that (a) you intended another to eat it and (b) you intended them to be injured. If so, it is certainly no defence that “they deserved it”. Personally, I think this would be difficult to prove if the poision in question was a laxative, easy to prove if it was (say) rat poision.
The issue in the second case would be whether I acted with reckless disregard for the well-being of others. This would be somewhat easier to prove, I would think, in the case of something harmful but not usually injuring such as a laxative. Again, “they deserved it” isn’t a defence.
A better one would be that “since the food was mine, I had a reasonable expectation that only I would eat it”. This would get you off the hook in the case you mention - mixing medicine with orange juice for your own use - unless there was some convincing evidence that, beyond a reasonable doubt, indicated that you really wanted to poision a thief.
The third case is more problematic. If one was to put, unlabelled, a dangerous drug mixed with a food item into a communial fridge, and someone ate it and was injured, I suspect that one would be on the hook civily for negligence - as it is reasonably foreseeable that someone could eat it by accident.
Edit: here’s the exact provision for the first and second cases:
I’m guessing magnesium citrate.
Probably the same stuff. In all my life, it was the most horrible-tasting substance I’d ever put into my mouth.