Cooking Smelly Foods in the Work Kitchen: Yea or Nay?

In a related issue ... DO NOT go out for lunch on Friday, eat half of it, and leave your slice of pizza/chicken fajita salada/pastrami sandwich in the employee lunchroom fridge until next Friday.

 

Paper I used to work at didn't have trash collection on the weekends, and everyone ate takeout. Everyone knew the drill, so they would all throw their food in the can farthest from the newsroom, near the elveator. By Sunday night, that thing was RANCID! Not much smells worse than spoiled chicken. Other than Fart, of course.

 

Those French are so rude. It's like they have a different word for EVERYTHING!

 

In college, we had a big community garbage can in a utility room in the dorm. It was cleaned out by the janitorial staff every day, but they had off on weekends. Without thinking about it, I threw a little bit of ground beef in there after dinner Friday. On Sunday night I walked past the room and saw some flies buzzing around, but there was a lid on the can so the smell was kept in check.
Until I lifted the lid to see what the deal was.
As soon as I did, both the smell and the realization that I caused it hit me.
I quickly put the lid back on, gagged, and tried to lay low for a while.

 

From the TMI Dept.: I chew tobacco and typically spit in a plastic bottle. Got into my buddy's truck and made the MASSIVE mistake of popping open a bottle I had used previously. I will only say that the combination of my horrible breath, tobacco juice and the warm Southern sun does not produce a pleasant odor. My buddy was none too pleased.

 

When my wife used to smoke, she'd keep an old Coke can on the porch to drop her butts in. She also had the annoying habit of not quite finishing the Cokes she drank, and then leaving the cans laying around the house.
I found a can on the counter that had a little weight to it, went to finish it off before throwing it in the trash and, well, you can see where this is going.

 

Yep. I almost got into a fight at a Dave n Busters-type place once because I was playing Pop-a-Shot and picked up what I though was my beer. Took a sip and didn't like the taste and could feel the wet cigarette touch my mouth. I immediately spit it out, right next to a young kid walking by. Dad was not too pleased, but what was I supposed to do?

 

USA Today, this is 1989 or so. One of the page editors, a seemingly fine person otherwise, would bring this little earthen pot of fish stew to work and zap it in the microwave. Good Lord, it smelled like a dead pussy. I really don't know another way to describe it. Eventually somebody - not me - suggested that she quit doing that. Yikes.

 

Our ad person burned popcorn a few weeks ago. About a week later office was finally back to smelling normal (or as normal as an office with two full-time office cats can smell) when she reheated some Starbucks and somehow burned that, too.

 

This is the worse. People bring back leftovers from lunch, put them in communal fridge then forget about them.

They can stay there for months.

 

I'm resigned to the fact that most functioning adults are incapable of properly using a work breakroom.

 

A copy editor at my former paper used to cook tilapia or some other aromatic type of fish in the breakroom microwave. The stench was almost beyond imagination. The breakroom was separated from the newsroom by a 50-foot-long hallway that usually provided a buffer from cooking smells, but that fish odor was simply too overpowering. That copy editor was not a nice person, and she didn't like it when someone suggested that her cooking was bothering others.

We also had a case of a foul-smelling desk occupied by an obese older copy editor. A few courageous souls decided to investigate on his day off, and they discovered several half-eaten salami sandwiches in the top drawer. Lord only knows how long they'd been there.