Taxing Everyone’s Olfactory Organs
There are a number of stories on Not Always Right about us tax accountants and our infamous fridges. Difficulties with break room cleanliness are endemic to the tax industry. Here’s another such story.
I work in a very large tax office. We share our office and break room with the local corporate headquarters. Corporate would only spring for a half-sized fridge for them and our office to share. My direct manager realized that was inadequate and bought a full-sized fridge with his own money. He never submitted a reimbursement to headquarters, so technically, it’s still his fridge.
Five years later, he retired and a new manager took over. During that time, people stopped taking care of the fridge, and food was often left to rot in it all eight months outside of tax season. Since our office was also the corporate headquarters for this region, and corporate shared our break room and fridge, corporate objected to our inability to keep the fridge clean and to the smell emanating therefrom.
Corporate threatened to take our fridge away from us if we didn’t clean it. They gave us a year to shape up.
I personally don’t bring food to work. I never have. I’ve never even used our break room. Our break room is incredibly gross, and on days I was asked to help clean, I refused. For one thing, I won’t be held responsible for other people’s disgusting habits. For another, I don’t even go into the break room when I’m on break because I’ve got a replacement organ and take immunosuppressants. I’m not going to risk my health cleaning biohazards for my job. And they don’t have the chutzpa to fire me for a clear medical condition.
Every attempt to clean up the fridge room would quickly break down when someone mucked things up for everyone again, and everyone else would refuse to do anything about it.
We absolutely failed to shape up. If anything, between the blame game and the backstabbing, things got worse.
Corporate hired a moving company to rip the fridge out of the break room and dispose of it, contents included.
This did not make the situation better. Now, people were storing rotting perishables in the unrefrigerated cabinets or just outside the back door to take advantage of the winter chill. The smell got worse, and the back of our office became a trash dumping ground. We got an infestation of mice and cockroaches.
This is where the ownership question became relevant. Corporate did not own the fridge; [Former Manager] did. Even though he was retired, he objected to the fridge he had bought with his own money due to corporate’s stinginess being removed from the office he had close personal ties to.
So, [Former Manager] requested legal reimbursement in the form of a new similarly-sized fridge. Corporate obviously couldn’t return the fridge as it had been thrown out, and [Former Manager] wasn’t willing to accept a cash payback, so rather than fight it in court, corporate decided to buy us a new fridge.
Which we promptly started abusing once more.
At least the return of the fridge got people to stop storing rotting food in the cabinets, many of which eventually had to be removed due to their resulting biological contamination. I’m told it looked like something out of The Last Of Us toward the end.
I continue to stay away from the break room for my own mental health and physical safety.
