So I was in the office break room today, puttering around, getting a cup of coffee for myself and not being in too much of a hurry about it, if you know what I mean, when I noticed we'd run out of the powdered creamer. Nasty chemicaly stuff, but if you want to suck down the cheap coffee they give us without sweetening it up a little, be my guest, is my feeling. Anyway, I thought I remembered seeing some creamer, some real stuff, in the refrigerator. I figured someone bought their own creamer and kept it for work. Snobby, y'know.
Now, I'm not normally an advocate for stealing. I'm not the Grazer who tries to eat for free out of everyone's lunches or anything. Nah, I mostly just pop down to Tony's for a slice of pizza (and the usual diarrhea a few hours later, but hey, what's a little food poisoning among friends?) Sometimes, if I'm feeling fancy, I drive up to the Sand Witch Sandwich Shoppe and get an actual couple slices of bread and some greenery, almost like real food.
Point is, I pay my own way, mostly, and a couple times I brought in a dozen doughnuts to share with the office, so I figure, let's say someone has a personal stash of creamer in the fridge, they won't miss the ounce or two I'd need to make my cup of mouth-scalder palatable, right? No harm, no foul. So I go rooting for it.
Brown paper bags and red and blue coolers all over. If you have an insulated cooler, why would you put it in the fridge? At that point, doesn't it become technically a warmer for whatever's inside? I dunno; people are weird.
After a few seconds, I spotted a bottle of CoffeeMate French Vanilla, and it's a little frou-frou but I can deal. I reached in to get it - it was way in the back, like it hadn't been used in a while - and I was threading it through the bottles of Coke and whatnot when my arm brushed one of the brown bags, and it just dropped right out and bounced on the floor.
Yes, bounced. With a little hollow "toonk," too. I bent to pick it up and it weighed nothing. I tapped it against the fridge door, then checked inside.
A Styrofoam insert. With little half-shapes like a can of soda and a sandwich-y kind of square.
Who brings a fake lunch? WHY bring a fake lunch? It was right at the front; someone had put it in today, or wanted it to look like they had.
Suddenly I was conscious of how quiet it was in there. The hum of the air conditioning overhead. Down the hall, the click-clack-clatter of people busily typing away, work-work-work like little robots all day long.
And in here, me, under the harsh fluorescents, smelling musty air and echoes of the cleaning chemicals the janitorial service uses, holding a fake lunch and an expired bottle of creamer in front of an open fridge. How many others inside it? How many out there? I told myself it was the cold giving me goosebumps.
I wonder if Tony is hiring.
Submitted May 15, 2016 at 03:10PM by Scattercat http://ift.tt/1ZSUZWV nosleep
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