Not for the faint of heart

Today, at work I fought back. I had to. Not the pregnancy rumors, I’m still having too much fun with that. Today’s effort involves wearing a schmatte with an empire waistline. Tomorrow, it will be a muumuu.

Anyway, I fought back against the Office Fridge. 99% of you who have worked in an office know what I mean. It's that ginormous Petri dish in the kitchen, breeding who knows what bacterial colonies in the form of a refrigerator. That streaky brown stuff along the walls or the sticky residue on the handle can be categorized as biological weapons. And no one will do anything about it until either someone dies from toxic poisoning or we can rest assured that it's okay to throw the thing out the window, without harming anyone on the street below.

The fridge in our office was disgusting. I suspect that if it were ever to be left open for too long, polio would be back in full force. That thing looked like it hadn’t seen the light of day since the Paleolithic era. Yes, Virginia, dinosaurs had refrigerators too!

"There's no ketchup! Didn't I tell you we'll go extinct if there's no ketchup???"

One day, while at my desk, I will feel something brush my ankle. After scratching the itch with my other foot and continuing to work, that horror movie music will go on. Dun-dun-dun...DUNNNN!!!! Out of nowhere, I will be attacked by a Dole Pineapple can that had been there for so long, the microorganisms rallied and the whole thing came alive. Cue my current obsession with drawing arms and legs on inanimate things:

Our brave intern held this atrocity, while I took the picture. Because that's what I make interns do.

As someone who brings most of their meals to work, my only defense is to wrap the containers in a plastic shopping bag before putting it in there. Don’t judge me for this. Look at where I live. Considering what you see each day and how much you see of it, you just accept those kinds of conditions. I think it makes our immune systems stronger or something. It’s like how most of us could go onto the Health Department’s website to see the results of their restaurant inspections, but we’d rather eat our eggs with a side of e. coli in blissful ignorance.

But to smell it is another thing. Then it becomes offensive to me, because that's just crossing the line. And today I smelled it. I smelled something that no one should ever have to smell in their lifetime. And that was just so wrong! Whether I'm standing on the subway platform or walking the streets on garbage collection day, it doesn't have to look pretty; it just better be smelling like farkin' roses!

So I cleaned. Oh boy, did I clean. The fridge shrieked when it saw me coming with the Windex and dishwashing gloves on, and tried to make a break for it. But I held that sucker down and sprayed and sprayed and sprayed! It wailed au revoir to the red pepper hummus, which expired last September and went flying into the garbage. It cried as I defeated its pineapple'd soldier in a swordfight, using the plastic knives, and bagged it into oblivion. And then it gasped a final breath, as I wiped the last streak of sticky schmutz away from the handle and closed its door.

My co-workers cheered and clapped at my bravery, while claiming if they had known, they would never have let me do this alone. It was a brave thing for one person to take on. Yeah, yeah.

But there's still the Office Microwave.