The Company Refrigerator

I work for an aerospace company of about 70 employees. We have a nice breakroom with tables and chairs, coffee and vending machines, a microwave oven, sinks, a dishwasher...and YES we also have a Company Refrigerator. The company provides the refrigerator so that employees can bring their lunches to work and keep them cold during the day until lunchtime. I often bring a plate from home with leftovers from our previous night's dinner. Some people bring sack lunches and some people bring Tupperware containers with leftovers or a salad and dressing. The top of the fridge has a large freezer with an ice machine and space for frozen items.

As with any situation, there are always those who lack simple common sense, and who fail to understand basic ideas. They often cause problems. Let me explain.

We all know that food is cheaper when you buy it in bulk. For example, a frozen dinner costs less if you buy it in quantities of 50 or 100 than it is to buy one at a time. The same goes for peanut buttter. You get more peanut butter for your money if you buy the five gallon size container than if you buy it in a 16 oz. size. This idea of bulk buying is one that engineers easily understand because it involves mathematics including fractions and ratios. Therefore it is common to see an engineer buying things in bulk, whether it is food or quarts of car oil or postage stamps. This idea of buying things in bulk meshes nicely with another characteristic of engineers.

Most engineers tend to be a bit lazy. For example if engineers had their way, they would never make their beds in the morning. After all, you're just going to sleep in it the next night so why bother making it? And if they DO make their beds, they often just sleep on the floor or on the couch for the same reason. This is especially true of engineers that are not married, but that is another story.

If you combine this laziness with the desire to buy in bulk you have big problems with company refrigerators. Let me explain what I mean.
Our company is located across the street from a Costco. Costco is the perfect place to buy in bulk. It seems that everything at Costco comes in packages of two or more. In addition, all the containers are huge. If you go to Costco to buy a bottle of Asprin, you have to buy two 1000 tablet bottles in a single package. Milk is sold in gallon containers that are joined together in pairs with a nice plastic handle that makes it easy to carry two containers with one hand. Apples come in containers of 20 and bannas are sold in 10 pound boxes. When one of our engineers goes to Costco to buy lunch, he nearly fills the company refrigerator with his purchases when he returns. He is often too lazy to take his stuff home, since he will end up using it for lunches anyway, so why not leave it in the company fridge.

Our company refrigerator is full of bulk bottles of catsup, mustard, salad dressing, peanut butter, jam and numerous entire loaves of bread. In addition there are gallon jugs of milk and juice, 2 liter bottles of soda, and 5 pound packages of cold cuts. The freezer is full of stacks of frozen dinners, gallon containers of ice-cream and large bags of frozen vegetables. To keep their supply of food from getting mixed up with another engineer's stuff, they will often commandeer a drawer or a shelf and fill it with their personal items.

Sometimes employees will eat out at lunch. It is quite common for the women employees to return from lunch with doggie bags filled with left-overs. Of course they plan to eat it in the near future, but they soon forget about it and there it stays taking up even more of the limited space.

Now if all of this wasn't bad enough, there is the constant problem of spoilage. Left-overs don't usually last more than a few weeks before they start to decompose. The odor of rotting food can be quite strong until it becomes intollerable, and begins to taint the other food items inside the fridge. When that happens, one or two employees join together to clean the company refrigerator. No matter how much advance warning they provide the other employees, the cleaning day arrives and the fridge is usually full to its maximum capacity. It takes a lot of courage to toss out expensive Tupperware, family dinnerware, and perfectly good food items. There is usually some scraping to do where something has leaked out and dripped down the inside of the refrigerator. Hot water, soap and disinfectant along with plenty of elbow grease, and the company refrigerator is soon empty and clean. The odors are gone and you feel confident that it is now safe to store food inside without fear of food poisoning or contamination.

But it is a losing battle... for on the morrow the engineers return to work with their bags and plates and boxes and bottles and jars and ........