FRIDGE POLITICS

A couple weeks ago I wrote a short piece about the tricky phenomenon of having to share a fridge in an office environment and what it does to “inter-office” relations when the tricky matter of the “mysteriously vanishing milk” comes into play.

As the saying goes, “Can open, worms all over the floor…!”

Interestingly enough, however, since then I have been exposed to another facet of the small matter of “brew-up” politics in such an environment, a phenomenon that we are currently referring to as the “kettle hi-jack…”

This is when you fill up your kettle with water, switch it on, prepare the mugs by adding the tea bags or coffee granules and whatever milk you might find that you still have, and then return to your desk until you hear the satisfying click of the now boiled kettle.

Sometimes, however, that crucial five minutes might be interrupted by the footfall of an interloper who then takes advantage of your opportunity to brew up and leaps in to steal, yes STEAL, the very water you have yourself been nurturing in order to get your own fresh brew of revitalising and reviving beverage.

Notwithstanding this most heinous of victimless white-collar crimes, we have also been exposed to yet another variant which we can only refer to as the phenomenon known as “offering you something you don’t want in exchange for something that you’d rather not give away but now feel obliged to…”

Hearing our possibly quite affronted objections to a kettle hi-jack the other day, we were then presented with a certain someone knocking upon our office door and asking “Who’s are these brews that I’VE just made…?”

Naturally, we accepted that these were the ones which we had so carefully prepared for ourselves not five minutes earlier, and grudgingly thanked the person who appeared to believe that the simple process of adding the now boiling water to someone else’s mugs constituted the actual making of a round of hot drinks, even though one of them, in fact, was not one that we had prepared for ourselves, but had in fact been sneaked into the line by yet another third party person or persons unknown whilst the laws of thermodynamics were doing what they do.

This knock on the door was also accompanied by the “Oh, we’ve got loads of tea and coffee so if you ever need any…” defence, which is usually given by the guiltiest of milk thieves when they know that they are under suspicion.

This of course is a form of passive aggressive sleight of hand, also known as offering you something that you have no need for (given as our own supplies of such things were already plentiful) in order to get something that they really want.

You see, when someone has just made such a “generous” offer like that, it would be churlish to refuse when they immediately say “Oh, you’ve got sugar… Can I have a few spoonfuls…?”

Again, the foolish gullible liberal in me says that it’s really not worth getting worked up about something so trivial as a little bit of sugar, whilst the raging, seething madman within is screaming to the rooftops “No! Bugger off and get your own!” whilst accepting that I would never, ever, EVER want to use some of their coffee or tea bags despite the very kind offer…

Complicated times… Complicated times…

But then “fridge politics” really is such a bloody minefield. Like the person who uses the last of your carton of semi-skimmed and then says “Oh, you can have some of my UHT if you like…” (“Not on my Corn Flakes, thanks…”) or the person who leaves something to go furry and blue at the back of the communal fridge, or the person who discovers the green milk that has been left in the fridge for a couple of weeks, gags upon opening it, and then uses yours anyway.

It’s really all so complicated, when it ought to be so very simple: Leave my stuff alone and I’ll leave yours alone, too. Not that I would actually consider using your stuff, at least not without asking, and all that I’d like you to do is extend to me the very same courtesy.

As those blessed meerkats might say, “simples...!”