She cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – she cried out twice, a cry that was more than a breath: ‘the horror! The horror!’

I am she. The she who waddled to the office kitchen to retrieve the peanut butter and jam I keep in the fridge in case of emergencies; yes, by emergencies I mean dry, plain rice cakes. Given the limited shelf space in the communal fridge I am considerate enough to keep my PB&J in small plastic Rubbermaid containers so as to not take up too much of the fridge’s capacity. When I opened the fridge that morning, my peanut butter was gone… gone I say; hence, the horror!

It takes a special kind of person to walk into a kitchen, open the fridge, and take someone else’s food; special in the sociopathic sense of the term. Rule of thumb dictates that strip club rules apply when it comes to common room fridges: if it isn’t yours, you can look but you certainly mustn’t touch. Unfortunately for me, we don’t have some burly bouncer standing guard protecting the assets in question.

I contemplated embarking on an organization wide hunt for my peanut butter; yes like they did in Salem back in the day with the so-called witches; invoking mass hysteria among my colleagues – ‘if they took my peanut butter, your ham sandwich could be next. Where does it stop?’… together we’d hunt down the culprit and bring all of this to an end. No there would be no burning at the stake, but there would be some serious guilt tripping from the hungry pregnant woman and growing baby who were deprived of their second breakfast that morning.

I went through something similar a few years back with my cans of Diet Coke that would mysteriously go missing from the fridge. This happened more than once, until one day I’d had enough and decided to take action. To quote George W. Bush:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

I would not get fooled again. I started taping a note on my cans of Diet Coke that read: not yours. That way, if someone was standing there, fridge open, unsure whether or not they had placed the beverage there earlier, it was clear, they hadn’t. It didn’t matter who it belonged to, the key message was, it didn’t belong to them. This approach worked, and folks found it kind of funny – win-win.

You know, I can understand it when it comes to a can of Diet Coke, it is plausible that it could have been theirs, all of the cans look the same, but a small Rubbermaid container filled with PB? I feel like you would remember scooping a few tablespoons of peanut butter into a small container and then putting it in the fridge at work. I would anyway.

Sure, I’ve made peace with the the fact that I will not likely see my little peanut butter container again; and no, there will be no witch hunt at the office – ain’t nobody got time for that! Instead I have cut my losses and replaced the little container of peanut butter with an identical container, with identical contents. The key difference being the not at all passive aggressive label that now stretches across the front of the container. I think my message is pretty clear:

Stay great!