MILK NICKERS

After the really big issues have been got out of the way, those universal issues like job security, lack of pay rises, mismanagement, parking cars, and being stuck in a room with people you find it difficult to get along with, I suspect that the thing most likely to get the average office worker most wound up is the thorny issue of milk thievery.

After all, most of the activity and success of the white-collar world seems to revolve around the successful brew-up, and, in this day and age of shared spaces and the like, more often than not the supply of milk for the office cuppa is usually down to the individuals involved and them bringing along the milk which they themselves have brought with their hard-earned pennies, either for their own use or on some kind of understanding or rota system with their fellow brew drinkers.

Very few people, I imagine, get their milk supplied by the blank-faced suits lurking in the boardrooms of “The Evil Conglomerate” (or whatever other company you might happen to be working for). Oh, I’m sure that in their secret meetings all of the tea is brought in china cups, and the necessary lactic fluids are provided without them having to give it all that much thought, but for the trembling, misunderstood masses, what to do about the milk is largely seen as being their own problem.

Which brings us to the little matter of the “shared” fridge. After all, it is rather jolly of the pinstripes to let their underlings have access to a fridge at all, but when that very fridge has open access to all and sundry, well, that’s when the trouble really begins…

The floor on which our office lurks, for example, contains three separate businesses and there are another half-dozen or so lurking in other areas of the building to which I seldom venture. Well, not unless the downstairs toilet is occupied, or I’ve taken a delivery in the wee small hours before the rest of them have opened up for business. There is also a small kitchen area containing a fridge, a microwave, a sink, and some drawers and cupboards in which to keep the dwindling supply of teaspoons (which is, of course, another story…).

I should explain. It’s quite a long way to any retail outlets from our little box near to the sewage works, and so we tend to buy our milk on the way in of a morning, rather than having to plan some kind of a major expedition later on in the day, and so whenever the designated milk purchaser arrives in the morning, they place the carton in the communal fridge in the vague hope that it will stay there untouched until they need it.

However, in recent times, there has been a marked tendency for that particular quantity of milk to suddenly evaporate, almost as if the fridge is set at a temperature high enough to allow such a mysterious thing to occur. Either that or, ladies and gentlemen, we may have a thief amongst us…

“No!” “Surely not?” “How could they?”

I’m afraid it may very well be true, my friends. One of your fellow residents may very well be a bit of a tea-leaf…!

Nowadays, of course, in the very best traditions of “student living” we feel the need to mark the bottle with our company name in the vain hope that whoever it is might realise that the milk is not supplied for general consumption but is bought by individuals for their own use.

This, of course, seems to have made no difference whatsoever, and still the level of milk within the container mysteriously drops from wherever it last was when we made our last round of coffees, and we run the severe risk of having to take it black towards the end of the day, no matter how careful we have been in trying to eke it out for ourselves.

A quick internet search proves that this is not an isolated incident, but happens wherever people have to work together, and some office workers are, it would seem, obviously massively more selfish than others, and, if you delve deeper, you find out just how much of one of the big issues it actually is for a great many people. If you dig even deeper and find out people’s suggestions and solutions for this “little problem”, you discover very quickly how much deep-seated resentment there is out there for the various “milk-nickers” and just how much in the way of dangerous and downright illegal remedies ordinary people are prepared to consider.

It’s a boiling, seething kettle full of resentment, people, and one day it’s very likely to blow up in everyone’s faces…

Because we all know that it’s probably not such a big thing in the great scheme of things, and yet somehow it fails to be a trivial matter, because it is a bloody selfish thing to do when you think about it. I’m sure that the perpetrators think that it’s all pretty harmless and, at worst, a “victimless” crime (if there really ever is such a thing) coming mostly from their own ignorance, laziness and downright selfish attitude to everyone around them.

Or am I the one being selfish…?

I mean, you wouldn’t really mind all that much giving them a little bit of milk if they just asked, but people often think that such things are “victimless” crimes, even though we do actually have to buy our own supplies to add to our tea and coffee needs chez swamp. I guess they think that we buy it out of the goodness of our hearts, for the general good of the world at large, and that nobody would really be so very shallow that they would even miss the odd splash of milk, would they…?

After all, it’s no use crying over a little bit of nicked milk, is there…? Would anyone really resent someone taking just the tiniest drop of milk for their cuppa…?

You bet they would!