ho-bag
Like all office imbroglios, it started with a can of diet pop.
Human beings were not intended to share kitchens.
I know this because as someone who does not actually eat, I have plenty of time to observe those who do. Specifically co-workers. In several of my last places of employment, the most passive-aggressive behavior I ever witnessed took place not in the boardroom, but in the kitchenette.
/cue the ducks
Passively, aggressively, covertly, Co-Worker A (We'll call her Anne) began to exact her revenge upon Co-Worker B (We'll call her Anne, too, because that was her name) by taking, once per week, on nonspecific days, Anne's Diet Pop from the communal kitchen refrigerator.
People, this story will eventually prove that refrigerators are bad ideas at work, because honestly, adults do not play well together. Adults, particularly American adults, are among the world's biggest babies. They are, too, dummy.
Anne responded to that first theft with as much restraint as I've ever seen, "WHO'S THA SKANK THAT TOOK MY DIET COKE?" she asked during the benefits meeting.
One person snickered, but Anne couldn't locate the source among the 150 staff members present.
Anne then responded by labeling her diet pops with little stickers that at first said, "Anne's," then slightly bigger labels marked "ANNE'S," and then finally duct tape with the letters scraped out by an exacto knife, "I"LL MURDER YOUR FETUS, BITCH."
But the thefts continued to the point where Anne was practically a roving office, never at her desk for more than a minute at a time, always walking past the kitchen to check on her diet pop.
It really didn't matter. Anne always had one diet pop stolen until she had become fair worthless as an employee, and not much better as a human being.
By this time, pretty much everyone was taking sides, participating in the carnage. Teams pretty much fell along union/non-union lines. I'm pretty sure I became a suspect when I quit the union, but by that point I was pretty much drunk every day by noon-thirty, and no one steals booze from the refrigerator, in any case.
The funniest incident was when someone complained via the company intranet about how filthy the refrigerator was and how people needed to remove their foodstuffs, particularly those packages of Wrapples and Waffelos, since both products stopped being made in the late 1970s.
(Other items in the refrigerator that I’m not sure are still manufactured include:
Scooter Pies
Hydrox Cookies
Koogle
Underwood Deviled Ham
Tab
Steak-Umms
Mug O' Lunch
Hot Fries
Hoots
Lik em aid
King Vitamin Cereal)
Anyhoo, after the complaint, someone decided this was the green light for emptying the refrigerator of all its belongings every Friday at 1, and the first week people had to dig entire Tupperware sets and thermoses emptied into the trashcan.
Teachable moments abounded.
Which makes perfect sense being as how we were all educators.