Continuing with yesterday's theme of weird things people stole from our office...
The door to our suite was old, solid wood and very heavy; it was equipped with one of those auto-closing mechanisms which made it even heavier to open. One morning I arrived and did my usual serious shove to open the door and nearly did a face-plant. The automatic mechanism thing was in two pieces and hanging from the top of the doorjamb. Upon examination, I saw that there were scratches and pry marks all over the door - but on the wrong side for someone to break in. We'd had a break-OUT! Which was stupid, because you couldn't get locked in - the lock on our side was a thumb-latch, not a keyhole like a deadbolt. If we'd locked someone in, they had only to flip the lock, turn the knob and open the door, not bust out. But someone had, with extreme effort and difficulty.
We had to summon building management to repair the automatic closing thingy, and that woman acted like we were just as nuts as when we reported the Chicklet/battery theft. She got awfully quiet, though, when she arrived at our office and saw for herself all the fresh pry marks up and down the wrong side of the door.
Sheila and I looked around the office and all seemed to be in order. That is, until lunch time. She and I often ate lunch from this fabulous 'soul food' place where you got meat, bread, and two or three veggies (depending on your choices) for only $5.50. Portions were huge, too - each meal was enough for at least two lunches apiece, sometimes three, or two + an incidental snack. She'd gotten us food from that place the day before and when on Break-Out Day she went to reheat her leftovers, the scoops of veggies were sitting in their compartments apparently untouched, but someone had GNAWED her chicken leg and left the gnawed-on bone lying there! She was so grossed out...someone had pawed over her lunch! Mine looked untouched but of course we dared not eat that one either, knowing that someone had been into them.
We knew it wasn't an employee because as I wrote, it was a very small office and 85% of the time, it was only the two of us there (other people worked at satellite locations, traveled, etc.) and we'd have no reason to steal the other's food: we'd just ask and permission would be given instantly, no big deal. The alternative was assuming that someone had gone to all the trouble to gain entrance to the building, elude security, pick our lock and steal...a chicken leg!
I am ashamed to say that I teased Sheila about the allure of her lunch leftovers quite a bit. "Your legs are irresistible,", "I've got a BONE to pick with you", and just about every time we were getting lunch from the soul food place, I'd urge her to get ox-tails to make sure nobody would touch her leftovers. Or I'd tell her I needed to talk to her, uber-serious expression, nearly in tears, and mock-confess that I'd been the one who ate her chicken, tacking on some ridiculous reason as 'out of spite', 'to get even 'cause you made me add toner to the copier', 'I was jealous that you got the last telemarketer', 'cause every time [Hated Client] calls you just put him through', etc. The fact that her epithet of choice when I behave in this fashion is "you bonehead!" only added to my amusement.
I should have known karma would bite my behind. There came a day when we'd ordered Chinese food - similar large portions that did us for more than one meal. The next day I went to the kitchen to re-heat my Mandarin chicken, and the container of meat had disappeared. The container of fried rice was still there, but there was nothing to put atop it.
Another time, Sheila arrived first to find things askew and was in the middle of investigating when I got there. As the time I wrote about yesterday, things were not broken or missing, just a bit out of place, not quite right. That time, we found candy tampering. The Boss had recently brought in several tons of leftover Easter candy and we were keeping a huge crystal bowl in the middle of the conference room filled with chocolate treats. We looked closer at this because now the bowl was off to one side. There were a few very large - not quite tennis-ball sized, but nearly - balls of milk chocolate that you broke open and they had other candies rattling around inside. The foil on one of them at the top of the bowl looked loose, so Sheila picked it up. There were TOOTH GROOVES around the chocolate, then someone had put it back and rewrapped it. Again, not employees - it was ours for the taking anyway, and we'd hardly put it back with teeth marks! If we got something and didn't like it, we'd throw it away - no one cared.
We knew the cleaning crew was not responsible for any of these shenanigans, either, because usually they came in, started cleaning around 4:30 and were gone before Sheila and I left for the day - a bone of contention between us and Building Manager because it was kinda hard to concentrate, work, take calls from clients and so on when people were vacuuming loudly all through the office.
The thing that puzzled me most, even more than why someone would go to all the trouble of sneaking/breaking in, leave all the high-dollar equipment and even money lying around in lieu of leftover chicken and chocolate, was why they left the remains. Why not just take the chicken leg from the to-go box, eat it and throw the bone away? Why not pocket whatever pieces of chocolate they wanted, leave and toss the foil later?
The best story about weirdness in that building involves not the time something was taken, but the time something was left. I'll tell y'all next time.
The door to our suite was old, solid wood and very heavy; it was equipped with one of those auto-closing mechanisms which made it even heavier to open. One morning I arrived and did my usual serious shove to open the door and nearly did a face-plant. The automatic mechanism thing was in two pieces and hanging from the top of the doorjamb. Upon examination, I saw that there were scratches and pry marks all over the door - but on the wrong side for someone to break in. We'd had a break-OUT! Which was stupid, because you couldn't get locked in - the lock on our side was a thumb-latch, not a keyhole like a deadbolt. If we'd locked someone in, they had only to flip the lock, turn the knob and open the door, not bust out. But someone had, with extreme effort and difficulty.
We had to summon building management to repair the automatic closing thingy, and that woman acted like we were just as nuts as when we reported the Chicklet/battery theft. She got awfully quiet, though, when she arrived at our office and saw for herself all the fresh pry marks up and down the wrong side of the door.
Sheila and I looked around the office and all seemed to be in order. That is, until lunch time. She and I often ate lunch from this fabulous 'soul food' place where you got meat, bread, and two or three veggies (depending on your choices) for only $5.50. Portions were huge, too - each meal was enough for at least two lunches apiece, sometimes three, or two + an incidental snack. She'd gotten us food from that place the day before and when on Break-Out Day she went to reheat her leftovers, the scoops of veggies were sitting in their compartments apparently untouched, but someone had GNAWED her chicken leg and left the gnawed-on bone lying there! She was so grossed out...someone had pawed over her lunch! Mine looked untouched but of course we dared not eat that one either, knowing that someone had been into them.
We knew it wasn't an employee because as I wrote, it was a very small office and 85% of the time, it was only the two of us there (other people worked at satellite locations, traveled, etc.) and we'd have no reason to steal the other's food: we'd just ask and permission would be given instantly, no big deal. The alternative was assuming that someone had gone to all the trouble to gain entrance to the building, elude security, pick our lock and steal...a chicken leg!
I am ashamed to say that I teased Sheila about the allure of her lunch leftovers quite a bit. "Your legs are irresistible,", "I've got a BONE to pick with you", and just about every time we were getting lunch from the soul food place, I'd urge her to get ox-tails to make sure nobody would touch her leftovers. Or I'd tell her I needed to talk to her, uber-serious expression, nearly in tears, and mock-confess that I'd been the one who ate her chicken, tacking on some ridiculous reason as 'out of spite', 'to get even 'cause you made me add toner to the copier', 'I was jealous that you got the last telemarketer', 'cause every time [Hated Client] calls you just put him through', etc. The fact that her epithet of choice when I behave in this fashion is "you bonehead!" only added to my amusement.
I should have known karma would bite my behind. There came a day when we'd ordered Chinese food - similar large portions that did us for more than one meal. The next day I went to the kitchen to re-heat my Mandarin chicken, and the container of meat had disappeared. The container of fried rice was still there, but there was nothing to put atop it.
Another time, Sheila arrived first to find things askew and was in the middle of investigating when I got there. As the time I wrote about yesterday, things were not broken or missing, just a bit out of place, not quite right. That time, we found candy tampering. The Boss had recently brought in several tons of leftover Easter candy and we were keeping a huge crystal bowl in the middle of the conference room filled with chocolate treats. We looked closer at this because now the bowl was off to one side. There were a few very large - not quite tennis-ball sized, but nearly - balls of milk chocolate that you broke open and they had other candies rattling around inside. The foil on one of them at the top of the bowl looked loose, so Sheila picked it up. There were TOOTH GROOVES around the chocolate, then someone had put it back and rewrapped it. Again, not employees - it was ours for the taking anyway, and we'd hardly put it back with teeth marks! If we got something and didn't like it, we'd throw it away - no one cared.
We knew the cleaning crew was not responsible for any of these shenanigans, either, because usually they came in, started cleaning around 4:30 and were gone before Sheila and I left for the day - a bone of contention between us and Building Manager because it was kinda hard to concentrate, work, take calls from clients and so on when people were vacuuming loudly all through the office.
The thing that puzzled me most, even more than why someone would go to all the trouble of sneaking/breaking in, leave all the high-dollar equipment and even money lying around in lieu of leftover chicken and chocolate, was why they left the remains. Why not just take the chicken leg from the to-go box, eat it and throw the bone away? Why not pocket whatever pieces of chocolate they wanted, leave and toss the foil later?
The best story about weirdness in that building involves not the time something was taken, but the time something was left. I'll tell y'all next time.
2 Comments:
Bone of contention! Bwaa haa!
Either the cleaning people come back in to nibble, one of you is fucking w/ the rest of you, or you've got a Sasquatch on the premises.
By
Anonymous, at 11:05 PM
Hmm. I was going say mischievous elves, but it COULD be a Sasquatch.
That is seriously weird.
By
Still Trying, at 12:40 PM
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