We had a bad popcorn incident here a while ago. I wasn;t here the day it happened, but the enxt day when I entered our section of the floor, it all smelled like burnt popcorn. For weeks, the gorram kitchen smalled like burnt popcorn. Now, mercifully, the smell only comes out when the microwave is in use. This happen in the beginning of November.
Otherwise, everyone here is pretty good. Occasionally, there’s some crumbs or grains of rice in the microwave that need to be cleaned up, and the fridge is often home to all kinds of mutations, but that’s about it.
There is a person here whose watercraft is regularly unsunk in this fashion. Toe jam au gratin, I think.
When I worked as a bank teller, one girl used to do the whole office a favor by cooking “authentic” Chinese food every day, to be eaten by whomever dared. It was invariably liver sausages slow cooked in a crock. All morning the entire bank would smell like warmed-over ass.
He should see my office. Every friday at 3:00, the fridge is cleaned out and everything is put on the counter. Anything that is still on the counter when the cleaning crew comes after business hours gets tossed out. It doesn’t matter if you put a note on there, it’ll go. They’re usually pretty good about it and send out an email so you can go grab your stuff if you want to keep it. All you have to do is grab it, hold onto it for 10 minutes and put it back in the fridge.
Anyways, you’d have to hire some minimum wager to man the fridge - and if you do that you have to make certain that person will be good and not, you know, eat the lunches.
We have major fridge hogs at my place of employment. People store entire loaves of bread, big bottles of juice, large jars of jelly (there are currently about 10 jars of jam or jelly in the fridge), tubs of margerine, and even those boxes of pudding cups, with the pudding all still attached to each other. Then there’s the giant lunch box/bags. One woman was using a full-sized Victoria’s Secret shopping bag as a lunch bag for a while. Other people were putting their insulated lunch-bags in the fridge. Isn’t the point of having an insulated lunch bag to NOT have to put your lunch in the fridge? Did I mention that our fridge is one of those that are divided vertically between freezer and refrigerator? And that we have 36 people in our company?
Our fridge is cleaned out every Monday between 6a and 7a. Tupperware containers are dumped of their contents and the containers cleaned in the dishwasher, then left on the counter.
Isn’t there a conflict between the Smelly Nukers and the Food Nazis?
and
Who’s right?
I simply don’t understand Food Thieves. It’s not your food, why in the hell would you want to touch it? Whoever cooked it could have sneezed into it while they were making it!
The Microwave Hog. Frozen Lasagna is NOT a good choice in an office where you get 30 minutes for lunch and there are 50 people and 4 microwaves. It is downright rude.
Chatty Cathy. Hmm, I’m sitting at a table buried in the Wall Street Journal. That probably means I’m not feeling very social and am not in the mood to talk about what happened on Survivor last night.
Stinky food. Look, it is an office, ok? No need to bring in exotic cusine with a strong odor.
The Lunch Commentator. I think even worse than the diet commentator is one who simply has to make a bullshit comment…“UMmmmmmmmmmmmm, that smells Gooooooooooood.” Um, it is a Lean Cusine, so go fuck yourself.
“Is that ALL you’re eating?” I don’t think I’ll develop malnutrition in the next 4 hours. I don’t tend to eat big lunches at work as they make me sleepy. Also, if I have dinner plans, I may often only have something light.
The “Let’s do lunch.” crowd. I hate, hate having my arm twisted to go out for lunch with co-workers. I know every now and then it is a necessary evil. But, there is no way I’m eating out at a restaurant I don’t want to go to and spending money I don’t want to spend for 5 days per week. I love our new 30 minute lunch schedule which prevents this for the time being.
My office has a microwave that does something like this. It’s a Sharp Platinum Collection Carousel. I don’t know how it works but it seems to use half power until the popping starts, then full power for about 90 seconds. I’ve never had bad results except for one bag that was defective.
Wow, I thought I was the only one cursed with a sock-nuker cow-orker. He uses it for back and kidney pain, but frequently forgets and leaves the sock sitting in the microwave where the next unlucky passerby has to remove it.
I feel that I am therefore justified when I bring in my leftover fish vindaloo, or my sauerkraut and sausage, and nuke out the socky smell. Vindaloo will purify anything
Oh, I didn’t notice there was a question. What does the popcorn button do? On older microwaves, all it does is set the timer to an approximation of how long it takes to nuke a bag of popcorn. Newer ones, like the Sharp mentioned above, are better at knowing when to stop.
Anyone else have a Black Hole Refrigerator? People put their food in there and promptly forget about it. We’ve had a pint of chcolate milk in ours since October.
One of my co-workers likes to drink fresh milk. Every day someone from our office (or egads another department!) would pour some into their coffee saying, “no problem it’s just a drop”. By the end of the day the milk would be empty (empty carton returned to fridge of course).
So he put a giant label on it that says, **“Go ahead, help yourself. But I drink straight from the carton”. **
Perhaps a note left for a sandwich thief could simply say - “go ahead I licked it first”.
In the course of my (what is it? Nine years working in offices now?), I think I’ve run into every cretin mentioned in the thread already except the smelly-sock nuker, and that probably because it’s a fairly new idea. And you know, I bet you every one of those people doing all these idiotic, mean, unpleasant things all think there’s nothing wrong with it, and happily justify it in their heads.
Ooh, ooh, I thought of another one - the Newspaper Nesters. You know, people who bring a newspaper in to read each day, and before you know it, your lunchroom is taken over by newspapers everywhere. Although in all fairness you can’t really blame the people bringing it in - just the people who leave it spread out everywhere.
(I was the smelly lunch nuker once - I re-heated salt-and-pepper squid without realizing what it would smell like. I apologized profusely and learned from the experience. Holy mother of god, does squid stink when it’s re-heated.)
We used to have one of these in our office. He’d start in on people before the food even got to their mouths. (“Is that cheese on your sandwich? Do you know how many fat grams are in cheese? You should eat like I do. Nothing but tuna. That’s why I have such a low percentage of body fat.”) I felt sorry for him after awhile – I think he had orthorexia.
In my case, I was. She had made the same complaint (on different days) about my spaghetti, a sandwich, and a (non-fishy) Lean Cuisine before I told her what I thought about it. She always had a cheeseburger with ketchup only for her lunch, so I think she had food issues. Picky heifer.
I can do you one better - or worse, depending on how you look at it. I work with a whole buttload of triflin’-ass people who will leave their own lunches in the fridge for entire presidential administrations, but they’ll take someone else’s the second you turn around. I can’t tell you how many pudding cups, yogurts, string cheeses, Hot Pockets, etc. I’ve lost to these people. Bitches.
BUT. The absolute worst problem in the building is what we like to refer to as “the creamer situation.” We have great coffee and an excellent selection of teas, but only powdered creamer. Ick. So, many of us bring our own creamers of choice to work. Mine is usually plain old skim milk that I buy by the pint at a convenience store. Every day for more than a month, someone opened my brand-new, still-sealed container and helped themselves, leaving me only a few drops. I got tired of it, so the next day I brought in a recycled container with the label removed. I filled it with milk from home, but wrote “BREAST MILK” on the bottle with red Sharpie.
I shit you not, that milk got gone. People is nasty.
