Superman’s cape. A dog’s food bowl. Yellowcake Uranium. Every child knows these are things you just don’t mess with. This morning at work, a chance meeting and an innocent quip has prompted The Captain to add one more thing to this list: the workplace fridge.
As I walked past the mini canteen area this morning, I saw a dumpster surrounded by a gaggle of gals in front of the communal fridge. As you know, the unusual excites me, so I paused to take in the scene to try and make sense of it. This was not your typical quarterly fridge purge. This was a grass roots organization of employees who were sick and tired of the status quo. The Fridge Party, as I like to call them, were exercising their rights under the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution to assemble in public and freely and openly bitch about all the disgusting slobs who regularly mistake the fridge for a long term storage locker or makeshift science lab, or the lonely bachelors who intentionally leave food in the fridge just so they can experience what married men do and see a woman clean up after them. They call themselves the Claim Committee for Clean Food Storage (CCFCFS). I heard they may be on the Terrorist Watch list.
Normally, a large trash barrel is used for the purge but our cleaning militia had brought in the heavy artillery: a portable dumpster. In the past, crudely written flyers filled with elaborate food storage rules and threats of tossing perfectly good food containers and insulated lunch bags would be posted periodically; occasionally someone would even post something mildly humorous. Nevertheless, the offending parties were gambling on the power of OCD, waiting for the CCFCFS members to be overcome by their disorder and chuck the old food, wash and dry the containers, and leave them neatly on the counter to be anonymously retrieved, along with a nasty note like my Mom used to write to me predicting that I would one day catch Salmonella and die a slow and painful death. Still here Mom!
But this time was different. I saw them actually take sturdy plastic Rubbermaid and Tupperware containers and drop them into the dumpster. Silverware. Igloo lunch bags insulated with toxic material. All discarded and destined to clutter our landfill for centuries to come, left for the OCD offspring of the CCFCFS to manage. Throughout this ejaculation of plastics, it seemed to The Captain that the committee members were extracting an unhealthy measure of joy in the performance of their duties, as if the bitter resentment of the past several years was slowly oozing out like pus from an infected wound.
They’d hung some official looking laminated signs, one with a set of rules that Stalin would be proud of, and one that looked like some sort of Manifesto outlining the crucial role of clean food storage in maintaining social order, protecting the sanctity of the marriage and keeping the masses pure and free of food poisoning. There was even a poster filled with photos of moldy and decrepit food containers, like some lineup book at the police station, waiting for eyewitnesses to come by and finger the offending storage criminals, a grim reminder for the scofflaws who dare to leave that leftover tuna sandwich in the fridge.
Being me, I assumed they were having a little fun with the whole thing and quipped, “Hey, it’s the Fridge Police!” Mistake. Instantly, four pairs of raging eyeballs were burning holes through my skull. Fortunately, the Men’s Room was just around the corner, so I immediately took refuge and locked my self in the nearest stall for good measure.
Three hours later, the coast was clear (for the record, my work productivity did not take a hit, as all I missed was a couple Project Iteration Team update meetings. For the uninitiated, this means I missed NOTHING, if by nothing you mean continually being asked for feedback about really cool computer applications that our IT team has neither the budget nor the expertise to ever actually build). The militia had retreated into the proverbial hills, but the revolution had been a success. The fridge was spotless and completely empty. It appears our brown baggers prefer to take their chances with food poisoning rather than risk incurring the wrath of the CCFCFS.
Believe The Captain when he says: Stay out of the Fridge!
Yours investing in Cooler packs,
The Captain
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