The Social Politics of the Office Candy Jar
Despite the optimism of the old
song, “the times, they aren’t
a-changin’.” Over a decade ago, I
worked in a very small office with one other person. So excited to have my own office space, I put
a jar of candy out for those people who would come in to see us for meetings
and the like. Our supervisor would come
in daily… and within three days had single-handedly cleaned-out the jar. He said, “Gee, I’ll have to bring some candy
in to fill up the jar.” (No kidding,
Sherlock. You wiped us out!)
I waited. The jar remained empty. Eventually, I put the jar away. It didn’t seem right that someone making, oh,
three times my salary couldn’t cough up a bag of candy occasionally. I sure as hell wasn’t going to continue
feeding HIM. Oh no, don’t get me wrong,
I don’t begrudge him sharing our candy; but he didn’t share it: he wiped us out like locusts going through a
wheat field!
Years later, my current office
has re-instituted a candy jar.
Intriguingly it was just toward the end of Lent … when a lot of people
“give up sweets or candy” as a religious penitential practice. Well, our office apparently wasn’t
participating in that foray into monastic practice. One person magnanimously kept filling the jar
with an old fashioned favorite:
“Werthers.” Then someone else
called me from a shopping excursion to ask if another brand was
acceptable. I approved. After all, if you are going to ask the
opinion of someone, of anyone, about
a food that has potential as a fattener, you ask…. The Fat Chick.
Put your eyebrows back on your
head. I coined the title myself and I
revel in it. For a while I thought of
calling my blog “Ask the Fat Chick” but decided too many people wouldn’t roll
with my sense of humor. And, when all is
said and done, I am trying to write for
my readers – and to encourage some general civil sensibility amongst the human
community. I am also writing to give my ironic thought
process a venue.
So here I am sitting with a jar
of Doves or Hershey’s behind me and I am observing the way people relate to
pure opportunity. I type away, but I can
hear the stealth person that slides over to that counter and gently lifts the
lid to ferret a piece of heaven out.
Inevitably it is their nerves that cause them to accidentally “clunk”
the lid on the jar or the counter. I
spin around and say: “Caught you!”
Some people chuckle and walk away
with the chocolates. Others look
embarrassed for a moment and I have to coax them into taking a couple to their
desk.
Other people come through and
lift the lid as if they are checking a pot of stewing tomatoes. “Hmmmm… just looking to see ….” Yeah, right.
Just looking. Sure. And I’ve got a bridge in Apache Junction,
Arizona, to sell you. That’s the person,
the “just looking” person, who is going to take four or five and clean us out
by the end of the day …. and not replace them.
I am not beyond asking someone
(because I am over 50 by a few years now):
“So what will you be bringing
in when it’s your turn to fill the jar?”
And I have. And I liked doing
it. That’s what makes it bad, or
naughty. If you eat, then you contribute
also to the stash. That’s the rule.
Today someone left a dozen donuts
in front of me. I have nerves of steel
and didn’t even have ONE. Well, I also
had a hunk of baked oatmeal I was working on, which is more properly thought of
as “oatmeal cake with chocolate chips” for breakfast. The donuts were not calling to me. I did open the lid to look at them so they
wouldn’t think I wasn’t a fan anymore. Donuts
are very sensitive and need to feel well-liked.
I would never hurt the feelings of a donut if I could avoid it. Donuts are important in our society: they keep our police forces working. If I owned a donut shop, I would make a
special donut the shape of a badge with blue frosting on it. If a person came in wearing a badge, they
could automatically have a donut for free.
I’m nice like that.
But sometimes I am not nice. I can be, ah, shall we say, a bit testy? Like when there is a box of fresh donuts
sitting on the counter and someone cuts a third of one and takes it back to
their desk it makes me very unreasonable.
I do not care about your diet.
(Reference other blogs where I bash the dieting thing.) But if you cut a donut, the part that is left
behind gets stale exponentially FASTER than the piece you took. I don’t know why it works that way, but it is
Donut Physics and it is true. It is
proven in offices everywhere across our nation on a weekly basis. If I was a little old chef who “cookit the
donuts” I would take a spatula and swat your hand! “You!
No cutta my donuts all up in little pieces! They go bad!
Then nobody want them!”
Maybe I should just have a candy
jar and donuts at my house. Then I
wouldn’t be such a corrections officer about the people who swing by “just to
look.” Maybe I’d be completely enormous
watching tv and eating junk food and feeding the dogs goldfish crackers by
popping them in the air. Wait, I think
they call that “retirement.”
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