A Thief With A Heart Of Gold

I am the office food thief. I honestly consider it fair wages because I’m also the only one who cleans the refrigerator and the desks. I look for food that’s about to expire and I eat it. I also watch people’s lunches, write their names and the date on it if they forget, and make sure that if a lunch is in the fridge longer than a week and a half, it gets thrown away.

The new manager decides to do something about all this food theft. It is all me. I keep track of all the food in the office. My desk is closest to the fridge for a reason. She says it’s completely unacceptable and that if she catches someone stealing food she’s going to fire them.

So, I stop… and I also stop cleaning out the office fridge. Within about six months, the office fridge is so full of expired food and freezer-burned TV diners as to be unusable. The fridge itself stinks. Worse, certain coworkers have filled their desks with candy and snacks, bags with five chips, quarter-filled Cheetos bags, melted chocolates, etc. Those have attracted mice and insects.

I approach the manager and make an offer: I’ll take on the responsibility of keeping the fridge and desks clear of expired or old food, and in exchange, I can eat what I want.

The manager gives me a weird look like she thinks it’s weird that I like eating almost expired food, or maybe like she realized what was happening… but she accepts.

I take a few evenings after work is over and clean out the fridge with soap and water, check all the foods, throw out the old sack lunches, clean out the desk drawers with soap and water, install new mouse and insect traps, put a new de-stinkifier in the fridge, and go back to being the office food thief… with official sponsorship!