Office Refrigerators

Although I'd rather have one than not have one, a community refrigerator, like the one found at your office, screams disaster. It's where culinary packaging, social responsibility, and enzymatic browning all collide within a shared setting. It's where your evolved bad habits of uncleanliness and failure to timetable your expiration dates taint the sanctity of all other brown-bag brunches and leftover lunches. Simply put, it's where your mess is everyone's mess.

These refrigerators don't have to be like this. They can run and cool and preserve without the presence of vomit-inducing sights and odors. The problem is such refrigerators don't seem to exist in any office break room.

Every office refrigerator contains undiscovered horrors, where fruits and vegetables that once donned vibrant hues of red and yellow and orange have waned to greens and browns that Crayola has yet to name. Food textures have altered and grown fuzzier, with their cores and surfaces hardening where soft and softening where hard. And somewhere in the corner, behind that half-eaten office birthday cake and the bottle of lemon juice no one knows who originally brought in lies a small, cubed Rubbermaid container enclosing a now unidentifiable dessert with a questionable glaze and 5 o'clock shadow. Some of the dishes, beverages, and condiments have been imprisoned within the walls of the fridge for so long, for so many consecutive weeks, that they have better office attendance than their owners.

With just a few months of dedicated collective ignorance and rudeness, the office refrigerator successfully transforms from a temperature-controlled safe house for snacks and meals-for-one into a 24.9-cubit foot Petri dish. God knows what's festering on the surface of that chicken salad sandwich that’s been enclosed in a baggie since Labor Day.

If you're going to use the office refrigerator, use it like it's your own at home. And if you use your own at home the same disgusting way, then think about changing your fridge habits, or just scrapping the idea of owning a fridge altogether and relying on take-out nightly. No one wants to see or smell today what you brought in for lunch four months ago.