The Social Politics of the Office Candy Jar

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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Gambling with Intent - Part 2

Gambling with Intent - PART 2.

Yet a decade later, casino-resorts began popping up around the United States.  Little old ladies from outlying neighborhoods were bused-in for BINGO! Night that was augmented by flashing lights, music, and silliness.  I guess that is a lot bigger draw than sitting on the front porch watching the grass grow.  Young adults would come out for an evening of poker and liquor and the fantasy of going home in some way a winner.  Middle aged people stroll through the casino after enjoying a nice dinner in a nearby restaurant.  Out of town visitors came to eat cannoli, enjoy the waterfalls (indoor or outdoor) and get a break from their hum-drum lives.  You get the idea.

For at least five years I held out against casino gambling.  My main concern was for the people that would gamble away their social security and go home destitute and sad.  I don’t know any of those people, but I am aware it happens more often than not.  I have a friend who grew up in Las Vegas and we had a conversation about the sociological fall-out of gambling that always gives me pause.  The Philadelphia area did a study quite recently about the impact of smaller casinos that were opened in suburban neighborhoods.  Their study is an important read for any community considering small casino placement.

But for my purposes, I wanted to check out the larger casino environment and see what was to be seen.  My partner in this faux-crime coaxed her husband to come out with us for dinner to check out a casino at a horse track.  It was a snowy, bitter winter night when smart people would stay home.  But then again, that describes about five months out of the year where we live, so we acclimate and venture out. 

We sat down in a dining room that reminded me of a giant chess board…. With large people as the pieces on the board.  The buffet was mediocre at best.  The ambiance, for a place that had recently been up-graded, just didn’t have a cozy feel to it.  We got up to venture to the gaming area while her husband sat and “watched” our coats… and kind of napped I think.  For each of us, we did pretty well on our first machine and cashed out.  We walked over to her husband who presumed that we had been shamed by the Gambling House, and clearly he wasn’t paying attention to our giggling like school girls.  Once we got outside of the range of other ears we both told him how well we did on the first machines we tried.  I consider walking out with $40 in my pocket very good when I had only put in ten.  He was incredulous that we had any luck.  I wonder if beginners luck has less to do with the beginner than it does with the way slot machines respond to cards that have never been used before.  It is a theory.

For our next outing, we went to a more resort-style casino.  I had already put my personal preservation rules out verbally to my friend for the sake of not getting sucked in by the siren’s call of the slot machines.  It went as follows:

#1)  I set an amount that I would use to play, and would not exceed that amount of my own money.

#2)  I stayed on the penny slot machines because you lose a lot more slowly that way.

#3)  If the machine did not give-back by the time I had put 50% of my money into it, I declared that machine “cold” and switched to a different machine.  (Actually my Aunt coined the term “cold” – credit where it’s due.)

#4)  If the machine went up over $50 in winnings, I gave it three more pushes to keep going up.  If it just started to go down on those three tries, I pulled the winnings and called it a day.

The corollary to all of these shenanigans is my friend’s far simpler rule:

You play like crazy and once you win back your original investment, you pull just that much out, put it in your pocket, and play on what’s left.  Theoretically, you are only “losing” the house money.  She treats the game as a time occupier; while I treat it like an ATM.  I want to pull more money out, not just keep myself busy.

Here’s where the psychological study came to the fore.  I asked questions and identified answers like: 

What makes someone choose a particular machine initially?

Does a woman playing the machine who is overweight or on an oxygen tank choose a machine that has a sexy blonde on it because she wishes it was her?

Does a man choose a slot machine with dragons on it because he perceives himself as mystical and sneaky?

I played Queen Isabella because I absolutely loved the sound of fireworks going off whenever it gave me some winnings.

My one friend plays a game that has the same name as her dog.

My other friend plays the games with horses on them.

I enjoyed the game Splitting Hares because the bunnies were cute, the lady bugs on the home screen fluttered and moved around, and I, for some reason, did really well on that machine.  Then it disappeared.  The machines were always being switched, moved, jockeyed to another location on the floor.  I wonder why that is?  Hmmm….

There is an unwritten code of Casino Etiquette.  Or maybe not.  Perhaps some people have manners that they utilize in any environment, and others are jerks and do not.  Case in point: The woman sitting next to me was smoking.  The ash tray was on the wrist board in front of me.  I discreetly moved it to the left to be on her area for her use.  She held up her cigarette, as if she wasn’t aware it was blowing directly into my face.  I cleared my throat.  Soon thereafter I got up and left.  She won.  Not the slot machine.  She got to move the ash tray back and I walked away appalled.

How do I feel when I win?  I never played in competitive sports, other than board games, so I don’t know what it feels like to kick the goal that wins the game or provide a perfect assist.  When the computer, oops, I mean slot machine, in front of me leads me to believe that I have “won” money, I feel proud.  I also coddle that feeling in a quiet way so that people around me don’t know how happy I am to feel “lucky.”  Only occasionally I tap the wrist board like an excited rabbit.  It’s quirky, I know.

When the money starts “crashing” and I’m losing fast, where is my brain?  The logical part of me says:  This is gambling.  This is what this machine is designed for – to take my money – when it gives me money, that is an aberration, not the norm.  It is at this point that a gambler can be “born” – the minute, in the midst of crashing numbers, that your brain says,“it will rebound.  It will come back up again,” you have entered into the center of the boa constrictor’s zone.  Repeat after me:  “It does not have any moral obligation to rebound.  It most likely will not come back up again.  This is designed to engage you and then leave you penniless.  That’s why they call it gambling.”  This is a mantra.  

It is necessary to not gamble unless you can maintain this concept, or it will squeeze the cash right out of you every single time with you thinking there is a shred of justice in the machine and it might pay you back this time.  It is not designed to work that way.  It is a tease-disappoint-tease-again scheme.

Do I feel compelled to go more often?  If I have lost my original $20, I walk away and am glad that I have also set time-parameters on how frequently I can go to “make a donation” to the Casino employees.  If I have won, I am also glad for those parameters because it keeps me from being dragged into a mentality that somehow I can replicate this moment.  New mantra:  I cannot make this happen again.  No rabbit’s foot, no troll doll in my pocket, no mystical feeling can predict the next time I will win.  There is no water-witching divining rod for this enterprise.  There is just this time, this way.  There are no obligations or givens.

How often do I intend to do this?  Not often.  Mostly I can think of more exciting ways to lose my money…. like lighting a dollar bill on fire.  (and then you go to jail for a federal offense and meet handsome jail guards?  Well, that’s not a given either.) 

Do I plan to buy Life Insurance any time soon?  Nope. 

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Gambling with Intent - Part 1 of 2

Gambling with Intent                     

My sociological intrusion into the world of casino gambling was, of itself, a calculated risk.  The bet I was making was that I was stronger than gambling itself and could pass into that arena on an exploratory basis to study the way I felt as I gambled, as well as to observe the people around me and draw some understanding from that experience.  I wanted to see and draw some of my own conclusions.  It is only in retrospect that I can identify how much gambling is embedded in the cultural framework of my upbringing.

I grew up surrounded by the casual interference of low-risk gambling within the weave of life events.  For sake of interest and comparison I mention that my religion even has a reference to gambling which was never addressed as a negative, only as a matter of fact statement:  While Jesus hung dying on the cross, the New Testament gospel writer says that the soldiers “cast lots for his garment” since they didn’t want to tear it.  It really has less to do with gambling than it has to do with the concept of not wrecking a nice tunic. 

My friend’s religion, another expression of Christianity, sees that story as an example of the evils of gambling.  I kind of shrug my shoulders and walk away with the sense of: it was about two guys trying to decide in an unbiased way of who gets the “goods.”

During my high school years, I remember many churches in my denomination used to utilize the game of BINGO! for purposes of paying salaries for their school teachers.  A decade later, I found it ironic that in one city parish, BINGO! was on one night and Gamblers Anonymous met another night.  Same facility; different agenda.  When I took a pastor to task on this – I know, just imagine me doing that – his response was that Life Insurance is, essentially, gambling:  You are betting them you WILL die an untimely death; the Insurance Company is betting that you WON’T.   This is one of those cases were you raise one eyebrow and end up responding, “Yes.  But that doesn’t make it right.” 

A decade later, a new family tradition began in my world:  lottery tickets at major holidays.  One member of my family routinely wished everyone a happy holiday (whichever it was) and added, “And this year, may someone in the family hit MegaBucks!”  Another relative would say, “You’d have a better chance of getting hit by lightning.”  And in the end I’d find my own mouth forming the words:  “Well, somebody’s got to win.”  My shred of cosmic optimism is one of the most dangerous mindsets in the arena of gambling because it is what keeps you at the slot machine for another ten dollars’ worth of loss, but I digress.  To the point: the spin off to all of us otherwise hard-working, sane-minded people (in varying degrees I suppose) was that we would get about 30 lottery tickets and evenly distribute the same to people around the table who would soon begin scratching like a country dog in the summer heat.  The loser tickets were handed over to the children for double-checking.  I remarked to my sister-in-law that perhaps Child Protective Services would take a different view of the way the Polish families teach their kids math.

During my young adult years I kept company with a dear friend that enjoyed the horse races.  So, like an annual ritual, once or twice a year – during the summer – a few of us would drive out to the nearby track to have dinner and enjoy the racing phenomenon.  Because at least two of us were, well, as poor as church mice, we looked at our wagers as entertainment in lieu of seeing a movie or some other venue.  The ongoing argument we had was how, by what philosophy of gambling, would the bets be selected.  I will call my friend John Patrick.  John Patrick believed that you bet on one horse per race, to win.  Our friend Michaelango would bet on a horse usually based on the tips provided by the guy who wrote the newspaper column identifying the favorites.  His wife would bet on a horse because she liked its name.  

And then there was me, the geek.  I used the tips from the newspaper column, did not bet on every race, but I bet on not one, but TWO horses … to come in Second Place.  This drove John Patrick crazy.  He said I was “betting the horses against each other.”  Yes.  And, no.  I was betting that even though these horses were top picks to win, they may have a fault and at least one of them should come in second place.  With each bet costing $2, it seemed reasonable that if one of the two won, I’d at least re-coup my $4 spent.  All of these theories being topped by my friend’s mother’s propensity to bet only on the last race:  She would look at the jockeys of the horses who won each race, identify the jockey who had not won at all that night and for the tenth race bet on him.  In fact, she was betting with the idea that the whole thing was rigged.  I miss those days.  That kind of gambling, for us, was very communal, engaging, and quite funny.