(Prodigal spoon)
In my work, there is a shared canteen space.
Microwave, tables, sink, communal fridge, vending machine (when it works). You get the idea, you’ve seen a hundred like it, right down to the cork board with its pinned cards and dated notices.
I could talk about the shared fridge…could, but it wouldn’t be anything you hadn’t already heard somewhere else. Instead, I want to talk about the cutlery drawer.
Five forks (one is plastic), about twenty assorted soup spoons, two hundred and sixty five dinner knives, and an ever-decreasing number of tea spoons, which briefly hovered at -one -a folding camping one- and recently went to zero.
I carry (wouldn’t you know) a spare fork (actually three if you include the spork), but when I go to make coffee I expect there to be a tea spoon!! I don’t take milk or sugar, surely a spoons’s not too much to ask?
Now I occupy a fairly minor position in the hierarchy of our organisation, mistaken drivers do sometimes call me “boss”, but technically as a supervisor, I ever hold that those who see a problem should be the ones who address it… so by the third day of the great tea spoon debacle I cracked and bought a cheap cutlery set for the common good (Home bargains £2.99).
At 15:00, just before I began my Tuesday shift, we were good for four (count them) four tea spoons.
By 17:00 we had three.
By Friday we had two.
The final one hung on for almost three weeks. (” I don’t want to go !”)
Then once again we were reduced to shaking coffee from the jar or estimating about half a dessert spoonful. (The forks weren’t doing so well either).
There are some things, which should not be tolerated, in a first-world kitchen area!!
I searched the back of the cutlery drawer, nothing, well not nothing, but really, you don’t want to know. I cautiously searched other drawers. I opened some of the undersink cupboards; Cornflakes from 2003, a fabulous stash of tiny salts from Macdonalds, Jimmy Hoffas wallet, a passage to Narnia, none spoons.
Then today, oh frabjous day! Two spoons! Where have they been? Narnia? The Committee office? Did they run off with the tupperware lids? Some questions we will never have answers to, surely enough that they are back.
Kill the fatted calf, hold a feast of tea making, the prodigal spoon(s) have returned!
Next week on IaDL: It’s “V” time again.
I read this back over, and I’m not sure I’m entirely right in the head, but it was either spoons or the terrible smell coming through the ground floor, and that’s just not funny in the slightest.
Dalmallyfest the Asylum 