I’m Going to Leave a Bowl of Spaghetti in the Supply Room and See What Happens
I woke up in a bad mood this morning because last night I watched Mamma Mia! which is quite possibly the worst movie ever made, even when you include that thing I saw on YouTube where some random people in an office are doing the Electric Slide in the middle of the day. The only good thing about Mamma Mia! is the song and dance number over the end credits because (a) Colin Firth is completely committed to that sparkly blue Spandex jumpsuit, and (b) it indicates that the movie is over.
But speaking of YouTube, this morning I saw what I consider an instant classic, entitled “guy uses webcam to catch the office thief.” That’s a copy of the original video, which was removed at the request of the original poster’s company, but which will exist in perpetuity in ganked copy after ganked copy because good luck eradicating anything you’ve ever posted on the internet.
Since that copy will probably be gone in about a minute, I’ll recap:
Guy keeps bowl of fruit on desk.
Pieces of fruit go missing over a period of about a month.
Guy sets up webcam.
Webcam records Cleaning Woman brazenly taking apple.
Webcam records Cleaning Woman brazenly eating apple.
Guy makes screensaver of Cleaning Woman taking and eating apple captioned, “Stop stealing my things”; leaves webcam in place.
Denim-Pants Coworker notices screensaver, shows it to Khaki-Pants Coworker.
Khaki-Pants Coworker guffaws.
Coworkers and their pants leave.
Cleaning Guy comes in to empty trash.
Cleaning Guy sees screensaver.
Cleaning Guy makes “Baroo?” face.
Cleaning Guy makes schadenfreude face.
Cleaning Guy continues to make schadenfreude face.
Cleaning Guy is really really enjoying the feeling of schadenfreude.
Cleaning Guy goes and gets Cleaning Woman.
Cleaning Woman sees screensaver.
Cleaning Woman is confused.
Cleaning Woman is indignant.
Cleaning Woman picks up apple and makes puzzled face so as to indicate that she’s never seen fruit before in her life.
Cleaning Guy waves it off as if saying that this is all nonsense and she should forget about it.
Cleaning Woman and Cleaning Guy leave.
Cleaning Guy returns to shut the door.
Cleaning Guy returns again to look at screensaver some more.
Cleaning Guy returns yet again and takes a picture of the screensaver.
I pledge my eternal love to Cleaning Guy.
The End.
Evidently, the original video got something like 100,000 hits and started quite the debate in the comments section. Some people felt that the Cleaning Woman was clearly a thief and the guy she was stealing from was entirely justified in using a camera to catch her. Others felt that a bowl of fruit on an office desk is no different from a bowl of candy on an office desk and everyone who works in that office is free to take from the bowl. And the largest percentage of commenters felt that even if the birth certificate is real, there’s no proof that Hawaii doesn’t move around in space and time like that island in Lost, so Obama’s still not a U.S. citizen.
Initially, I thought, “thief! thief!” But the “bowl of fruit = bowl of candy” argument might be convincing me otherwise. If it were just one apple sitting on his desk, I would say it was clearly his. But I don’t really see the point of keeping a week’s worth of fruit out on display. If you want to eat fruit every day, you can bring fruit every day. There’s no reason to build a little shrine to it in your office. After all, a person doesn’t lay out five salami sandwiches on their desk each Monday and expect them to last the week. As far as I’m concerned, if you have more than one salami sandwich, you have too many.
More generally, it’s been my experience that the person with the bowl of candy on her desk is often kind of an ass about it. They don’t ever not have a bowl full of candy and should some hapless new person tentatively ask, “do you mind if I have one of your Tootsie Rolls?” they put on a facade of offense and say, “of course not! That’s what it’s there for! This candy is for everyone!” but they also complain all the time about how no one ever gives them any money for all the candy they give out. Or if someone does give them money, they complain about the amount. “Bob gave me a dollar. I guess he thinks I buy my candy in the 1930s!”
No one has a candy bowl on their desk in my office. (My office-office, that is. My office at home has a lot of chocolate, but it’s the sugar-free non-delicious kind. I buy it when it’s on sale, and the cashier invariably asks, “is this good?” to which in reply I sigh mightily and say, “not really.”) Sometimes someone will come back from vacation and bring candy, but this ends up being more of an annoyance than a nice treat. One of the assistants is perpetually dieting, but is extremely bad at it, so that when a big box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts makes its appearance she whines, “I wish people wouldn’t bring in caaaandy. Now I’ll never lose any weigghhhttt,” and she groans literally every single time she passes the box. This goes on for several hours until she finally takes a piece. Then she repeats the process until all the candy is gone. Everyone generally tries to eat more than their share just so the groaning will stop sooner. Groaning is not an appealing sound. One time just to avoid the drama altogether, someone who’d gone to New Mexico or Arizona or someplace brought back two kinds of salsa instead of candy. Unfortunately, they didn’t bring chips, so the jars just sat there for a few days until someone took them home.
I think after I sat through Mamma Mia, early on a Saturday morning a couple of months ago, I, too, said to one of my friends: “I think I’ve just seen the worst movie ever made.” It was one of those train-wreck movies that I couldn’t switch off, and I actually sat through the show on Broadway (my mother is an ABBA fan…i thought it would be a nice gift. Let’s just say it was less cringy without Pierce Brosnan). I mean, who advised Meryl Streep that she should try this whole musical thing out? Wow. Singing is not her strength.
I think if you bring in food, you’re asking for trouble. People steal things from other people’s desks. It happens. If you like keeping all of your fruit in a bowl, put it in a cabinet or, I don’t know, a drawer or something. Don’t be a dick.
I would like to see a nice bowl of salami sandwiches, though. I think that would be fancy.
I’m so glad you saw Mamma Mia! (exclamation point required, yet undeserved) because I need to talk about it but no one I know will admit to having seen it. First, Pierce Brosnan. Do you think when he was singing he was in physical pain or was it just that when he was singing I was in physical pain and was projecting that onto him? Meryl Streep, I love like butter, but she was way too old for that role and it showed. When she was having all the summer flings and getting pregnant twenty years earlier? She would have been 40. Julie Walters just made me sad. I didn’t even know that was her until the credits because all I could think was that she was some ungodly combination of Judge Judy Sheindlin and Gargamel. But if nothing else, this movie proves that I will watch anything if Colin Firth is in it.
Now that I’ve said “salami sandwich,” it occurs to me that one would really hit the spot right about now. Where is a Tony Baloney’s when you need one?
I would just like to say, I very much enjoy your recaps, whether it is The Bachelor or a Youtube office fruit bowl sting. Please recap more things.
You shouldn’t encourage me. I have been looking for an excuse to detail The Karate Kid III for years now. There’s no leg sweeping, but it took forever to film so you do get to see Ralph Macchio’s weight change from scene to scene.
I am the 25%!
There is no 25%. There’s only the 1% and the riff-raff.
From temping at a medical office during the 1990s…I saw some very strange office food behavior. Drug reps would come in EVERY DAY for both breakfast and lunch and would always bring truly over-the-top type of food for the doctors and staff. A typical day was a spread of enormous bagels, butter and cream cheeses for breakfast. Followed by fettuccine alfredo, baked ziti, salad, and a chocolate cake with chocolate and yellow icing with PROZAC written in green across it. Everyone, particularly the nurses, complained about how much weight they were gaining/how nauseous they felt, and most of the staff was painfully overweight. There was also a stash of Slim Fast and horrible, aspartame-infused yogurt in the ‘fridge’ that no one ever ate. Once, when I forgot my lunch, I asked if I could have a yogurt and was rebuked: THOSE BELONG TO SOMEONE. But no one ever ate them.
I guess because it would never occur to me to put out food that I only intended for myself to eat (in agreement with your salami analogy) that I not would consider taking a piece of fruit from a fruit bowl ‘stealing.’ I would also never consider offering money for candy on a desk because to me the point of sharing candy is that: “I like candy but if I don’t share it, I will eat the whole thing myself.” If you’re buying candy, you’re shelling out $2.50 for a bag no matter what but the point of sharing is that you get to eat the candy but not so much that you hate yourself after the fact.
Stealing to me is when you make your perfect chicken salad with just the right amount of mayo, a little container of cashews, and veggies or fruit at the perfect stage of ripeness, write your name on it, put it in the refrigerator, and then find it gone, and you get pressured to put in money to the Wendy’s run that you don’t want to eat…
We never got the drug rep swag or free lunches, but our department chairman was always getting visits (and I suspect vacations and expensive watches) from a medical equipment company rep and the two of them would stand in the main office and compete to see who could be the most unctuous. For some reason they always stood with their faces two inches apart, but talked really loudly. It was bizarre but entertaining.
Ages ago, I kept a vintage box of cereal on my desk because it was odd and … I was odd, I guess. It was there for a couple of years and then for some reason, a coworker decided to open it and have a bowl. I didn’t like the guy before that, and that didn’t help matters. It was pretty old cereal though, so eating it was its own punishment.
Food on desks is personal property around here, but food on the communal counter or the one little table near the front door with the candy dish on it…that is for taking. Of course, none of us keep big bowls of stuff on our desks, ’cause that’s just weird.
Pierce Brosnan seems constipated throughout that entire movie.
I particularly enjoyed the part where Meryl Streep is singing “The Winner Takes It All” to him for what felt like a good twenty minutes, and he looked as if he was seriously considering leaping off the cliff to his death.
I worked with a guy who thought anything in the fridge for more than two days was fair game, but the good thing about that was that we never had to clean the fridge out.
I work in marketing for a commercial janitorial company and the fruitbowl is situation is very mild compared to what we deal with on a daily basis. Different offices have different rules about what constitutes a freebie. Some candy/fruit is for the taking (not personal property) but for office staff coworkers only (cleaners are separate, outsourced staff, not technically that sharing employee’s coworkers). Basically our staff is trained they are not welcome to grab any food left out (Whether desk, lobby, breakroom) unless specifically invited to share. Yet it is amazing what we find staff doing on security cameras.
Also, I found Mamma Mia hilarious if you view it counting on Pierce Brosnan to be ridiculous and unable to carry a tune. It is so painful I could not stop laughing (and cringing).
About ten minutes into the movie, I realized I was staring at the screen like a slack-jawed fool. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And Pierce hadn’t even started singing yet. Once he did, I seriously considered petitioning People Magazine to revoke his Sexiest Man Alive 2001 award.
I think that’s really interesting that you see your staff breaking the rules on camera. It occurs to me that I haven’t known who the cleaning staff is at most of the places I’ve worked (I feel sort of bad about this, actually; it seems like I should know) (also the verb tenses in this sentence seem all screwy but I’m too tired to fix them), but I’ve never personally had anything taken or messed around with or heard of it happening. Or maybe I have and attributed it to a dumbass coworker, then promptly forgot about it.
No matter the quantity or the ”display”, whatever is on one\’s desk is private property and not for everyone to enjoy, I’d say. I’ve had a co-worker, sitting next to me, who helped himself to a box of cookies I kept in a drawer. He ate the remaining half of a box but one. So I replaced the box and then put a bunch of tampons around it – it never helped himself after that, guess he was afraid of tampons or something…
I think if it’s in a drawer, it’s personal property, but if it’s on the desk top, then it might be personal or it might be communal, but in general, people should ask just to be sure. I had a secretary who locked up all her pens and post-it notes (which belonged to the office, not her), but kept a big box of Kotex pads on top of her file cabinet. She didn’t last long.
Now, here is where my logic becomes even more warped–for some reason, if a container is sealed, it ‘feels’ more like stealing than if it has already been picked at by others.
Also, why does taking a tissue if you suddenly need one from a co-worker’s desk ‘feel’ less like stealing than a banana? And why do some people think it’s okay to eat the grapes from the supermarket display when selecting a bunch, not consider that stealing, yet view eating a few pieces from the supermarket candy bulk bin not ‘theft?’
Incidentally, I would NEVER take anything without asking first, but I wouldn’t feel bad if people helped themselves to my Kleenex/ candy/ fruit bowl. It’s just funny how, once you soften upon the principle that ‘everything taken without permission is theft’ the lines get so fuzzy.
Even with communal pizza…it certainly is wrong to take a slice if you don’t contribute to the collective purchase of the pizza, yet it seems far worse to slip away with a fresh, hot slice than to have a cold, day-old slice of unwanted leftovers, since the pizza will just go bad…
I do feel certain than Immanuel Kant would consider taking the fruit theft, though.
What was the ‘vintage’ cereal? Was it Trix? I can’t believe that person ate that–that is like defacing someone’s desk photographs or knickknacks. Sadly, because the cereal was probably made with real sugar versus corn syrup, it may have tasted better than ‘fresh’ cereal made today…
It does seem to get more complicated the more you think about it. I doubt anyone would say taking a Kleenex is stealing, but why not? Maybe because it’s one of many and relatively cheap. If I have an open package of M&Ms on my desk and someone took one, it would be no big deal, but if I had a Hershey bar on my desk and someone picked it up and took a bite out it, well, I would be affronted. Pizza is like the M&Ms, I think, because there are several more-or-less identical slices. I went to lunch with coworkers at an Italian restaurant and one woman ordered a small pizza and ate all of it. Afterwards, two of the other women cornered me to get my opinion on pizza woman’s “selfishness,” which I did not agree with at all. The pizza was less food than most of our monster pasta dishes, but evidently, if pizza is in the vicinity of any group of people, it belongs to the group. This was years ago; I’m sure when new people come to work there, they point her out and say, “that’s Carolyn. One time she ordered a pizza and didn’t share it with anyone.” So I guess with the bowl of fruit, whether it’s stealing might depend on whether it’s a bowl of five apples, or it’s a bowl with an apple, an orange, a banana, a pear, and a nectarine. Either way, I stand by my original assessment, which is that if a person wants to eat fruit at work every day, they can bring it in every day.
You’re right about Kant, but Kant would also consider someone talking to his wife stealing, so I get impatient with Kant.
The vintage cereal was Uncle Sam cereal (I was working for the feds at the time, so it seemed appropriate). I’d bought it from a neighborhood mom and pop store whose owners didn’t believe that food could ever expire. It was mainly a Chinese grocery and I went in to buy sesame oil and discovered that they had a lot of things that appeared to have been sitting on the shelves since the Eisenhower administration. I can’t even find a photo of the box on Google image search; this one is close, but even that looks newer than the one I had.
I, too, like it very much when you recap things.
I recently had to move my desk to a different part of the office, far from my original cubicle. To encourage people to visit me, I went out and bought four Costco-sized bags of M&Ms and put them in a nice, clean, enormous container on the far edge of my desk, nearest the “entry” to my cube. Those damn things lasted forever – people were too afraid to take any.
See, that would hurt my feelings. If I put out candy and people were hesitant to take it, I would hold a grudge forever. Years later, one of them could invite me to a barbecue and I’d say, “can I bring anything? OH I GUESS NOT BECAUSE MY FOOD IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU.” Not that I ever have that problem. Once I had a piece of birthday cake on my desk and a coworker started eating it. And it was my birthday too.
I used to sit near the actuaries where I work. They like spreadsheets so much they even have one for scheduling treats, i.e. who brings treats on what day so as to not have some days with too many treats and other days with none. Ironically, they are also locked in some kind of “Biggest Loser” competition – there is a point system and you earn points each day by counting calories and/or exercising. (There is money involved, so though invited, I declined to participate.)
Since I was not technically part of their team, I never sampled any of their treats, although now I wonder what their reaction would have been.
I am also wondering if we have security cameras all through the building.
I love that they have a treat schedule! It’s so civilized. Also, it’s the way I would imagine badgers would do it, if they wore clothes and worked in an office. I do think it’s a good thing that you never took a treat without being on the schedule, however. Actuaries are necessarily on the cold-blooded side, and I can just see you going, “oooh, Toll House!” and then being dead before you’re able to raise the cookie to your mouth.
We have security cameras in some of the common areas but not in the offices. I’m more worried about random people taking pictures or making videos with their phones pretty much everywhere you go. Not that I’m out there committing crimes or anything, but people are basically mean, and I would hate to end up on someone’s blog or, worse, Glamour’s Dos & Don’ts page just because I’m between haircuts.
I can’t find your email address anywhere, and I have something to send you:
http://newscatgif.tumblr.com
The moment I saw that, I thought of you. Feel free to delete this comment, as I realize it has nothing to do with your post and I’m only using this communication route because I am lame and lost your address.
Cat GIFs are always relevant. Never hesitate to point me toward a cat GIF.
I guess I should update my About page. I’ve been saying that for four years.
I don’t work in an office but I do work the cat rescue adoption clinics on the weekends and that’s sort of like working in an office: there’s someone in charge; there’s someone who is entertaining (usually me); there’s someone crazy and manic (Nancy); there’s someone who I would swear is trying to play a Mary Kay Place character except that I don’t think she’s bright enough to have come up with such a brilliant idea; there’s someone who says hell and shit like some people say hello and goodbye (I like her); and there’s someone you would like because she’s almost (but not quite) an Eve Arden character, but she isn’t trying at it, she just is.
None of that has a bearing but I know you like information. Anyway. There are sometimes bowls and cannisters with candy in them, and someone keeps Tic Tacs on a shelf behind the counter.
I think the open bowls of candy are free to anyone who comes in, be it someone who works there, someone who is looking to adopt, or just one of the people who comes in to visit since they can’t have a pet in their group home (we get a lot of them and one has finally worn me down to the point where when she doesn’t show up I worry about her).
The cannisters are different. They are closed containers so it seems like you have to ask permission before you partake, and I think anyone who does not work there shouldn’t even ask.
The Tic Tacs I am convinced should not be consumed except by the person who bought them unless you are offered one first. You could make the argument that the container they come in is just a very small cannister so it’s no different, but I think because they can fit in your pocket or purse that they should be considered property of the purchaser.
As you can see, I have given this far too much thought, and it’s things like this that make me glad I have never been selected for jury duty where even bigger issues than candy ownership might be at stake.
In general, I am inclined to agree with all of that, except that if the canisters hold the same candy as the open bowls, then I think if you work there you should be able to eat out of them without asking, but obviously if you don’t, you shouldn’t walk into the clinic and say, “is this candy for anyone? Hey, there’s no caramel! OH I SEE SOME CARAMEL IN THE JAR!” Although I would imagine that happens anyway because people have no manners.
And initially I was going to disagree about the Tic Tacs but then I realized this is only because I find Tic Tacs to be a disagreeable mint-like item and would assume that someone wouldn’t take one unless they were in dire need. But once I substituted “Altoids” for “Tic Tacs,” I saw your point. It’s inconsistent with my stand on how taking from an open pack of M&Ms is okay, but I justify it on the grounds that with M&Ms, you can just tip one out of the package, but with Altoids, the person sticks his fingers in the tin and touches the mints adjacent to the one he ends up taking. Helping oneself is one thing; contamination is another entirely.
And this has nothing to do with your comment, but I’m now remembering a candy dish person who at Christmas time would replace the candy dish with a big jar of homemade Russian Tea Cakes and would then become incensed if anyone referred to them as Mexican Wedding Cakes. She was a good baker, but a bit of a racist.
I’m with Mary Pagones. If the product is wrapped, it’s considered community property. Unless your colleague takes the time to cellophane that cucumber, leave it the hell alone.
Actually, I think you and Mary are in direct opposition, unless you are speaking euphemistically, in which case, I believe we all agree.
Like Abby, I work with actuaries, too. They are certainly a special bunch. But their spreadsheets are GORGEOUS.
I’m suspicious of actuaries because they seem nerdly yet a little evil. If they weren’t actuaries, they would probably be taxidermists.