Clean up after yourself! Your mother doesn't work here! (Actually, it appears she does.) The Fairies Don't Work Here Anymore. Do Your Own Dishes! Any cups left lying around will be posted in the offender's pigeon hole.
I vacillate between amusement and annoyance at signs such as these scattered around a workplace kitchen. It particularly annoys me to hear people use the 'Your mother doesn't work here' oh-so-original one-liner. First of all, it's normally a middle aged mother whose mouth it comes out of (read: loco in parentis) and second, even if your mother did work there, why should it be HER responsibility to do people's dishes?
In my current workplace, which is populated overwhelmingly by women, the kitchen is indeed tidy and well-stocked. No doubt it's like this because some people take it upon themselves to be self-nominated Kitchen Nazis. They probably heighten their blood pressure in the process. Everyone in our office takes a turn, not only to provide the morning tea and buy stuff for the cupboards, but to keep the kitchen tidy. As I realised during 'my week', Domestic Training should really have been on the list of key skills needed to secure my job. (It wasn't.) I strolled nonchalantly into the kitchen one day to get a drink of water and one of the Kitchen Nazi Brigade told me that she'd 'Done my dishes'. For the record, they weren't my dishes. In between visits to the kitchen, we'd had a gaggle of visitors on a tour to the library. They had used some dishes and SHOCK! HORROR! The dishes had been washed, but they were left.... to dry on the drying rack!! After telling the Kitchen Nazi that I didn't give a shit about dishes drying on a rack when there's still global warming and child malnutrition (No, that's what I SHOULD have told her), I continued to watch the kitchen politics unfolding.
Last week, one of the men was on Kitchen Duty and I don't know whether he got any stick for it, but he's not fully up-to-date on the Kitchen Politics, and some staff members actually had to go out and buy some coffee for themselves. This is another interesting area. Some people drink Lavazza ground coffee (which the Kitchen Nazi told me was not 'freeze dried flash coffee powdery stuff' but FILTER COFFEE, excuse me.) Other staff members drink the cheap stuff. Some people have the occasional coffee; others are chain drinkers. Nevertheless, everyone who belongs to the 'coffee club' pays the same amount per week. (On paying for your own tea and coffee in the workplace... That's a whole nother rant.)
This week, the woman in charge of Kitchen Hygiene decided that she'd set up a 'naughty tray'. Any dishes left sitting on the drying rack were immediately transferred to the 'naughty tray' in the hope that guilt complexes would feel a twinge. This, despite numerous people admitting to each other in whispered tones that they actually prefer to leave dishes to dry rather than use a fluffy, damp, germ-ridden communal tea cloth.
So at morning tea I wondered aloud whether we shouldn't have a 'Good Tray', whereby we pull out all of the clean dishes from all of the cupboards and stack them up precariously. A few people giggled naughtily and I suppose I deserve my rep as 'trouble maker'... One time I left a packet of noodles on top of the fridge, wondering if this was against the rules, and partly to see how long they would last there before hasty removal. (Less than an afternoon, for the record.)
