Thursday, August 16, 2007

Kitchen bitchin'

To the horror of my younger (more radical) self, I work in an office. Of a financial institution. Do see that crowd in the distance? That's 22-year-old Nat leading a solidarity march to protest my bourgeois, capitalist existence. Just wave and smile.

Where was I? Right. I work in an office. I've sort of ended up here by accident, where an entry-level job turned into something a bit better, which turned into something that pays well but is mind-achingly boring and soul-destroyingly awful. Over the years, I've discovered that I don't quite fit in with the corporate culture here. Many of my colleagues have kids and spouses and cottages and minivans and fridges full of wine coolers and back decks with barbeques. I have a cool old apartment and three cats and I live in a state of arrested development that prevents me from even considering the possibility of being responsible for another human life.

I'm pretty sure that I was going somewhere with that but instead, I'll give you a photograph:


I know, I know. Bad shot. I didn't have my camera with me that day so I took that with my crappy cell phone camera. Anyway, to answer the question I can hear you asking as you squint and tilt your head, that is a tray of dirty dishes and three notes.

In my office, there is a large cafeteria on one floor, as well a small kitchen (fridge, microwave, coffee machine, sink) on each floor. There is a chronic problem of people ordering food from the cafeteria, taking the tray of deep fried, doughy goodness to their desks to eat, and then depositing the dirty dishes in the kitchen. It's quite unreasonable to expect them to go all the way to another floor to take their dishes back.

One day I arrived at work to find the above tray in the kitchen and a note saying Your mother doesn't live here, please take your dirty dishes to the cafeteria instead of expecting someone else to do it for you, Thank you.

This made me a bit mad. Not only did this note contain horrible abuses of the poor, misunderstood comma, but it was rife with outdated gender role stereotypes. So I (foolish Nat) added my own note. It said That's a bit of an outdated stereotype, don't you think? It's 2007.

Did it end there? No. Later that day a third and final note appeared saying Yeah, it's 2007 but how good does it sound to say, your father's 3rd wife is a liberated type who isn't going to pick up after some step kid from a husband she doesn't even love, and she is really just in the marriage because she is terrified of growing old alone! The bottom line is NOBODY is going to clean up after you so just take your own dishes to the cafeteria.

Who ARE these people I work with? I mean, jeez - my dad has only had TWO wives, not three.

1 comment:

  1. This is a relatively ancient post, so you might never see this comment, but may I just say how awesome this is? I'm a chronic note leaver at work, and I have yet to get a snarky (yet amusing) reply note back. Though there was the anonymous guy who left half a ream of thermal-digital photos of his wang strewn throughout our hallway. That was no so much amusing as very, very creepy.

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