Where the hell are all the bloody forks ? Our workplace typically has loads of the damn things in the Communal Kitchen Drawer. Bizarrely though, every now and again – am I'm not sure what causes it – they all completely disappear ! Vanished from sink, dishwasher, drawer, colleagues' desks… Knives and spoons are plentiful, but it's like the forks all fling their prison open and flap off into the night like some sort of anorexic, slightly curved and potentially dangerous bat (gawd, there's a sentence for the Bulwer-Lytton contest…).
The main side effect of this is that I had to eat my Marks & Spencer (Microwave) Chicken Korma with a spoon !
(Oh yeah, this'll be giving the “living vicariously” crowd a thing or two to think about – blog action doesn't get any better than this folks ! This is even better than the diary hole punching story or the microwave cleaning rhetoric !)
I personally believe that these random absences are some sort of psychological game in which some unknown opponent is trying to goad me into bringing my highly prized Spork to the office. But it's not going to happen.
M&S provide some quite serviceable plastic sporks – and don't think I'm maligning them, as I regard myself as quite the connoisseur of the plastic spork, second only to the work of Spiro – however for the eating of curry they're sadly sub-par. With a bit of correctly applied pressure the tines can penetrate soft fruit (e.g. pineapple chunks, mango), however the angle of incidence when the handle is positioned vertically is not conducive to the piercing of chicken, and if the tines are rotated about to be perpendicular to the meat surface then the force exerted on the handle produces structural flexing and a dissipation of force in the correct direction.
Put simply, not ideal.
In other equally relevant news, another one of those offers of questionable financial benefit turned up in the post recently. Now I realise that it's possible to get into a difficult spot from time to time, but looking at the cited example hardly seemed to smack of a particularly good deal worth any level of consideration.
I was genuinely hoping that I'd stop getting these after I returned the last one with “STOP SENDING ME THIS SHIT” scrawled all over it. Perhaps it's time to start sending their reply paid envelopes back full of restaurant menus and the like.