Refrigerator Epiphany

And, no, it has nothing to do with that little light inside. I figured out the refrigerator gnome when I was five, and see no need to revisit the subject.

I'm working the monkeycage tonight, and went to retrieve the salad I had stashed in the Production department fridge. Two slices of pizza that looked like the classic sausage, pepper, onion, black olive to me caught my eye for just a split-second.

Now, let me make clear that I am not the kind of guy who would snake somebody's pizza outta the employee fridge, dig? I got that out of my system working nighttime janitorial contracts with my step-father, and that wasn't food theft from co-workers.

(By the way, the next time you want to get indignant if someone suggests the cleaning crew is stealing food, let it go. They totally are. It's one of the few job perks.)

But anyway it occurred to me tonight as I looked at these pizza slices that I had no idea how long they had been there, and based on my knowledge of that fridge going back almost ten years now, it could be as much as three months between the periodic purges marshaled by some self-righteously irritated staff member. In fact, there is no way in hell I would eat anything out of that refrigerator I hadn't put in there myself.

And I think this actually makes your food safer. It's like an organic camouflage ecosystem develops in office refrigerators. There have to be some items that last long enough and look putrid enough to throw the quality of all other items into doubt. They are the warning signs, the bright markings that say "back up, yo." Then there is the dense undergrowth, the identical salad condiment jars of varied fullness, eleven varieties of low-cal Italian salad dressing, the myriad and diverse-yet-somehow-of-a-kind takeout boxes and tupperware containers.

It is really the ideal place to hide in plain sight, among the false morels, that leftover phad thai that ain't nobody better touch.