Search For Weapons Of Mass Expiration
The coffee room in office environments is not unlike the precious oasis in a desert: if anyone ever even thinks about contaminating the sacred haven in any way, it is instant blasphemy and all hell would break loose. And that was exactly what happened last week at the office.
It all began when some of the staff caught a whiff of a new odour in the coffee room. They mentioned it, but no huge fuss was raised because although it was strange, it was not outright revolting yet. Everyone just figured that it would eventually fade away like a silent passing of gas.
The next day, however, the odour clearly decided to hunker down for an extended stay. Not only that, but it really began to assault our olfactory senses by taking “outright revolting” to a whole new level. The odour is rather difficult to describe, though if I re-route all of my neurons’ collective computing power to this task, I would say it was almost like milk that had been ingested by a litter of skunks whose bodies suddenly realized they are lactose-intolerant and had to be rejected through multiple fits of explosive diarrhoea.
So naturally, with that kind of odour, it became the personal mission of some staff to locate the source of the sacrilege. The coffee brewer was scrubbed; the water kettle was rinsed out; the microwave was disinfected; the recycling bin was emptied out; the garbage can was cleaned and even the spare garbage bags were replaced with new ones. The entire room was pretty much turned upside-down and rearranged – with the exception of the hulking proverbial elephant in the room: the refrigerator.
The refrigerator is an extremely touchy area and it is a minefield subject if it is brought up in any conversation. This explains why it was left to the very end to be dealt with. You see, everyone has their little territory staked out in the refrigerator and whenever they feel their borders are being encroached upon, trigger fingers start twitching. However, by now, it was obvious that at least one of the territories was preparing to launch a bio-chemical warfare and pre-emptive action was necessary.
Of course, history – especially recent history – has shown that a massive, all-out, blind search for suspected weapons is not the most prudent method and would often have the adverse effect of a prolonged, costly operation. Therefore, we needed a surgical strike, though not in the military sense. No, our method of engagement had to be diplomatic in nature and I decided to use humour as my weapon of choice.
This resulted in my following e-mail to all the staff:
Hi:
There is a funky, new scent in the 2nd Floor coffee room and the source appears to be located somewhere in the refrigerator. If you have food stored in there, please ensure that it hasn’t mutated into a new lifeform. If it has but is not yet sentient, it may be just thrown out – it will probably find the dumpster to be a much more interesting environment to thrive in.
However, if you find that it has become sentient (i.e. it tried to communicate with you in some form that can only be classified as intelligence), we may need to call in representatives of both our government and the Federal government to confirm its peaceful intentions (with the military on stand-by, in case otherwise). Once confirmed, the United Nations will have to be notified in order to set up a globally-televised public announcement of the existence and nature of contact with this new sentient lifeform.
As you can see, it is quite a lengthy procedure so it is best to just make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place.
Thanks!
- Winluck
The staff seemed to take it well because everyone eventually cleaned out their individual spaces in the refrigerator and by the end of the week, the offending odour had completely disappeared.
The moral of the story is this method got the point across and it did so in a manner that did not challenge the sovereignty of everyone’s territory, which would definitely turn this matter into a long, tiresome ordeal indeed. Now, imagine the possibilities if this could be applied to the outside world.
Nicely done.