Salad Stealer

So, someone stole my salad out of the refrigerator in the kitchen at work last night... and I'm still annoyed about it. I'm territorial about my food. No, I did not grow up as the youngest of 5 siblings in a household where I had to fight for the last crust of bread. I was an only child with a single mother who would buy anything my stomach desired... but who, at any given moment, would feel compelled to finish off a 3/4 full container of ice cream or peanut butter or [insert anything you can eat with a spoon until scraping bottom] much to my foot-stamping disappointment when I would come home after school, anticipating a yummy snack only to find an empty spot where the ice cream/peanut butter/whatever used to be. This is probably also why I think the funniest line in the history of FRIENDS is when Ross said: "I grew up with Monica. If you didn't eat fast, you didn't eat!" For me, looking forward to eating something is almost better than actually eating it. I'm a bit of a hoarder. I have my vices (ie my own bottom-of-the-Nutella-jar-scraping tendency) but generally I'm the girl that can keep a stash of Kit Kats for weeks without touching them.

Back to the salad stealer. To be fair... the refrigerator here is a hotbed of abandoned food. It's eat or be eaten, so I should know better. But I never thought it'd be necessary to start writing my name on things! Let me start by telling you, the biggest perk of working in TV production is FREE FOOD. Our kitchen at work is so ridiculously overstocked that we could feed Sally Struther's entire village of starving Ethiopians and still have leftovers. Seriously, I'm not kidding. We have little elves (okay, Production Assistants) that go grocery shopping every week, buying anything and everything that is requested. Every shelf in every cupboard, upstairs and downstairs, overflows with a staggering variety of chips, crackers, nuts, cookies and candy... OH MY. Add to that the dependable B-L-D schedule and it's a bit overwhelming. Goes a bit like this...

Every morning, one little elf brings in a dozen bagels. For a while the bagels arrived with a platoon of flavored cream cheese spreads. It's gotten to the point now where we have an entire shelf in the refrigerator door devoted to the cream cheese. If you're not careful when opening it, you're assaulted with flying little tubs that splat at your feet and ooze herb & onion shmear all over. The bagels hang out all day, the poor unchosen left hoping that someone will wander in for a 4pm carb nosh. This never happens because... After breakfast - nay, DURING the consumption of breakfast - one of our little elves comes around with a lunch menu from that day's restaurant of choice. The choice is at the elves' discretion however there is often heated debate or a flat-out veto from one of my bosses that results in a new menu passed out. One day a week, a family spread is ordered from a short-list of approved restaurants and it's first come, first serve. By the way, I'm not even going to discuss trips to stage for rehearsal and run-thru. There's a whole other catered lunch for the crew and sometimes you're tempted to eat twice. Lunch usually is the high point of the day. Then shortly after lunch, there's a Coffee Bean run for the writers. And throughout the afternoon, multiple trips to peruse the upstairs and downstairs cupboards for a snack until it's time to go home. UNLESS the writers are having a slow day which turns into a slow night... Then we get to order dinner. That process is always a little more slap-dash than lunch, but still an elf, a restaurant menu and bags of excess food.

Well, yesterday we had a lunch spread from this Italian place. There is always so much left over that gets tossed, it's a real shame. And considering the salary I live on, I'm not above taking home food that would otherwise be wasted. Unfortunately, I'm never interested in the vat of spaghetti bolognese or chicken parm and there's never much of the healthier stuff left. This time though there was a good amount left of this salad I particularly like. I scooped most of it into a large Ziploc, stuck it in a drawer in the fridge intending to eat it for dinner. But when I stopped at the fridge on my way out, much to my annoyance, it was gone!

So, I was really pissed off. Like, more than I should have been. I mean, it's not like I paid for it. It didn't have my name on it. But it was IN A DRAWER. Which means someone foraged through the other options of less obviously hidden food and made it all the way to the Bottom Drawer and TOOK MY SALAD. I told myself, it's just lettuce. There are more salads in your future. Let it go. But oh... the letdown... I couldn't let go. Which is why I've clearly gone on way too long telling this story. But y'know what? Now I feel better.