There are mysteries in life I face every day I never seem to get answered and since, aside from weekends, I spend my days at work some mysteries in my life are work related.
For instance, why can you never get a good cup of coffee at work? Work coffee either tastes like somebody waived a few grounds over lukewarm toilet water or its burned and sour enough to dissolve the fillings out of your teeth.
It’s always been that way, no matter where I’ve worked or who makes the coffee, but I try and make the best of it. If the coffee is too weak I throw a bit of instant coffee in my cup, add a little milk and sugar, go back to my desk take a sip or two, let it get cold and toss it down the drain about an hour later.
If it’s too strong I add more milk, two sugars, go back to my desk, take one or two trial sips, grimace after each one, let it get cold for an hour and throw it down the drain.
By mid morning I usually give up and either make tea or wander off to some Starbucks-like place.
Another mystery of the lunchroom: You know those little dish sponges that have the green scrubby thing on one side? Why can nobody ever rinse one out and leave it on the side of the sink to dry? Whenever we get a new one, I find it left steeping in the bottom of the sink among the dirty cups and spoons, nursing billions of fat happy bacteria.
The first few days I usually wash it out a put it up to dry, but I give up by the end of the week, figuring by then it has been too heavily colonized to be resurrected to sanitary cleaning tool status and somebody will either dispose of it or it’ll just crawl of somewhere all on its own.
Don’t even get me started on the dirty cups and spoons in the sink.
I’ve never understood – at least not since I was a teenager sharing a house with three other guys where none of us did dishes because that was an important part of teenage single guy culture – why people can’t wash out their cups and spoons. One day our office manager taped a sign on the cupboard door above the sink admonishing staff, in big black letters, to clean up after themselves, which I figure just got some backs up and aggravated the situation.
By week’s end he cups and spoons always get cleaned up by one of three staff members – I never know exactly which one – who have even less tolerance for this than I do.
Then there’s the mystery of the disappearing forks.
We have plenty of spoons and an adequate supply of knives in the cutlery drawer, but forks – plastic, stainless steel or otherwise – are thieved by unknown culprits almost as soon as they are placed in the drawer, which means if you bring a lunch that requires a fork, but didn’t bring your own, anything you can’t eat with a spoon becomes finger food or goes uneaten. (Oddly enough, when I mentioned this to my wife the other day she said she found a fork at home that doesn’t look like it belongs to us.)
As an experiment, I walked to the dollar store, bought a pack of four cheap forks for two dollars and tossed them in the lunchroom cutlery drawer, just to see how long they’d last.
After one week we were down to three forks. By the end of week two we were down to two forks. Three weeks have gone by and we’re now back up to three forks. I figure one was returned by someone with a guilty conscience who found it when they cleaned up their desk last Friday.