Office kitchen wars are back

For the fridge, I liked a former company that had a policy that you label your lunch with a dated sticker. Every friday the fridge gets cleaned out. If you don't have a dated sticker, dated within the last two days, it gets tossed. Doesn't matter if it's in a lunch box or if you were storing bars of gold in the fridge.

If you have a fridge with lighter use, you can do the same think with blue and red stickers. Week 1 is a blue sticker week. Put your food in the fridge with a blue sticker. On Monday, everything with a red sticker gets tossed, blue stickers stay. The next week you switch colors and then switch back the week after that.

Only exception might be condiments which, if not labeled, are assumed to be for communal use.

Edit: By the way, I think the biggest issue, by far, is not people being inconsiderate, but merely forgetting that they had put stuff in the fridge in the first place. They buy a plumb, put in the fridge and then forget about it altogether until it goes rotten.

If you can’t trust your coworkers to not mess with your lunch, how do you trust them to do important work?

Before going full remote when covid started,we had a couple of offices. One was filthy, stuff all over the place, fridge looking like it's been a nuclear war inside,etc. The other was always clean,no stupid leftovers, toilets were pristine, and everyone always had "wow" moment when they walked in. I was in the clean one. How did we do it? Everyone cared about it from day one. People weren't leaving plates on tables but were putting away into the dishwasher. For the fridge we had a rule: not consumed by the end of Friday - it goes to the bin,no excuses. And even if it's only a few employees who care about it and do challenge others when things aren't right(e.g. leaving empty boxes instead of dumping them,etc), suddenly it becomes very easy to maintain high standards.

A bring my lunch in three brown bags labeled "A", "B" and "Control".

At my first job, this never got solved. One day a camera showed up, pointing directly at the communal sink.

I didn't use any of the dishes in the office, so it didn't really bother me. But it seemed like those most bothered by it were the ones leaving messes in the first place, why else would you have a problem with it?

Kind of a culture killer, the important lesson learned is you can't let these issues work themselves out, eventually you'll have a war with two sides.

Leadership matters, even in the most mundane of topics, like dirty dishes.

The biggest takeaway from COVID upon returning to the office kitchen wars: no fish in the microwave.

Simple draconian solution: evening fridge sweep, everything left in there goes right in the trash. Spray down with a mild disinfectant too, helps prevent transmission of flu, Covid, etc. Happily the pandemic makes this easier to justify. Appoint a health & safety officer, pass out memos, problem solved.

Also I thought we got rid of handshaking, can't we do Japanese-style bows or something instead that doesn't involve hand-to-hand transfer of viral and bacterial particles?

This seems like a pretty vapid article banking on the fact that you can claim any typical office trouble went away and is now 'back'.

Since offices can be daycare or high school for adults, it might just be easiest to get a well insulated bag or lunchbox to keep at your desk. The tech these days is crazy. Some folks I know have used a small cooled fridge meant for beverages. If needed throw some medication in it (like eye drops for those dry eyes) to keep it cool.

Community fridge - people can put shareable things here. Sometimes people have soda they don’t like or some frozen meals that they bought too many of they don’t like. If you let people know they can do the nice and thoughtfully hung, they will.

Someone I know would take left overs they were done with and still good, mark it as a free leftover lunch. Never know what someone’s momentarily experiencing in life, or when you might be. Oddly others started doing it.

On the other extreme, I know someone who experienced endemic lunch theft that it was bordering cruel and once attention was brought to it it happened even more. So they put already expired lunches in the fridge.

No mention of old-school counters to food theft - mineral oil salad dressing, laxative brownies, & such.

Nor of restroom trolls.

Nor...

If kitchen is unhygienic, is not that a violations of some safety norm? Is not company asking you to work at unsafe environment?

Restaurant or cafeteria with the same hygiene level would get closed and fined promptly. Who is cleaning it is irrelevant.

This nonsense is why I have avoided using office kitchens for decades. Much easier to opt out than to have to be involved with childish BS.

Worst and most psychopathic offense I've ever seen- in a coworking space- someone is reheating some leftovers in the microwave- another person stops the microwave, takes out the plate and puts it on top, then puts their stuff in and starts it.

Is this really hacker news material? I read a paragraph of this before I decided it was a massive wast of my time. Who cares about such petty bullshit? The only ting worse than "office kitchen wars", is creating an article whining about it.