The office rage against the machine
Nothing makes co-workers lose their cool faster than a biohazard in the icebox

By Heather Svokos Star-Telegram Staff Writer

*Judith Glaser in sixth section "You are what you regfrigerate"

Please post to all staff:

To the owners of the blue Tupperware bowl and the container of rancid yogurt in the office fridge: Please find another location for your lab experiments. We are all inspired by your work and indeed hope it leads to a cure for cancer and/or leprosy. However, the contents of the Tupperware have begun to sprout braids and the yogurt has started walking on its own. If you don't remove your petri dishes pronto, we will have no choice but to don Haz-Mat suits and force-feed them to you.

Move over, road rage. Take a flying leap, air rage.

Refrigerator rage is all the rage.

Who hasn't wanted to mow down their co-workers for leaving their moldy meals in the office fridge or, worse -- stealing your strudel? Friends fans will recall that when someone stole Ross' special turkey sandwich, his resulting rage got him fired. Elaine on Seinfeld was caught on a surveillance camera eating (and waltzing with) a very expensive piece of cake. In some offices, refrigerator issues can reach such operatic heights that management will create elaborate policies to defuse the situation. No one has seriously studied the issue, but in a work culture brimming with frozen wages, downsizing and Enronesque-apades, it may just be that 3-week-old egg salad that pushes someone over the edge.

Before we can completely defrost this problem, we must first stick our noses a little closer to the ick factor.

The culinary culprits

Abandoned eggs
The most disgusting thing left in the refrigerator at the Coppell-based headquarters of the Container Store? Hard-boiled eggs. "It smelled like a complete biohazard," said spokeswoman Courtney Shaver. "And then when we took the eggs out, they were gray and black and had weird fuzz growing from them."

Mammoth tray of lasagna
"It looked like we had enough penicillin to cure a Third World country," said Lt. Kent Worley, spokesman for the Fort Worth Fire Department.

Not-so pesto pasta
"One day we found what we thought was spinach fettuccini," says Worley's fire department colleague, Sondra Phillips. "It wasn't. It was fettuccini Alfredo that had gone really bad. It had that Is-it-spinach, is-it-mushrooms? -- kind of a look." She shudders. "Once we realized it was not something edible . . . well, we just, you know . . . [shudder]."

Month-old salad
"It had so much mold on it," says Stephanie Wells, a senior secretary at Tarrant County College, "we thought about taking it down to the science lab to let the students observe the mold growing on it."

Bad news broccoli
"It smelled like smelly feet," says Marti Dunne, who works at Carmichael Lynch Spong, a Minneapolis-based PR firm. "You walked into the kitchen and it smeeeelled, and then you opened the door and it was like: 'Ohhhh. . .' You are what you refrigerate Refrigerator rage may not be at the top of the list of workplace problems, but it is a legitimate and pervasive issue, office culture experts say. And how offices deal with it -- or don't -- might reveal something deeper about a company, says Judith Glaser, author of the newly published Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking.

"We're very territorial creatures," says Glaser, who was in Dallas this week as one of the speakers at the Women's Leadership Exchange. "We're given our space, we're given our cubbyholes, we're given our cubicles, but this is shared space, and in many companies, people don't work out the rules for shared space until it gets to the level of rage."

If you work in a company where people get along well -- or try to -- the staff will work together to put rules in place, Glaser says. "But if you're in an environment that has a lot of rage in it anyway -- factions, people that aren't getting along -- if your office has people that love to tell stories about other people, then why would they want to fix that problem?

"The refrigerator just adds another wonderful story into the process of gossiping, and also creates more opportunities for people to be attacked or picked on or create blame around."

The fridge, then, can be a barometer for what's going on in the culture of the office.

"At every one of my seminars, it'll come up as a question, and I cover it in my presentation," says Susan Huston of Arlington, who presents seminars around the country on business etiquette. "It is a problem. A lot of times, when I do present it, I'll get a whole bunch of people who come up at the end and say, 'I'm so glad you talked about that: It's such a problem in our office.' "

And although she rates it at about a 4 or 5 on her scale of office no-no's, Huston says it's the little things that "add up to really annoy people."

Keepers of the clean
Fortunately, none of the people we talked to for this story has ever succumbed to a Ross Geller-style rampage. But that doesn't mean it doesn't get under their skin (skin . . . that reminds us of a 3-week-old pudding we once knew . . .)

Just ask Dunne.

"I'm the self-appointed kitchen Nazi," says Dunne. She's also an executive assistant at Carmichael Lynch Spong. As it happens, executive assistants -- any kind of assistants -- are often the unlucky souls who are saddled with the unofficial title of Refrigerator Cleaner-Outer.

"It's kind of my thing, and their refrigerator makes me crazy," she says with a surprisingly good-natured giggle. "Because it smells and it's full of food that stays in there, and we work with adults who act like children."

When things approach a breaking point, Dunne sends out e-mails reminding her colleagues that they don't live in a stable. "And they all think it's really funny," Dunne says, and even on the phone you can practically hear her eyes roll.

Bonnie Boykin is the Marti Dunne of her office. But if she's as bothered as Dunne, she doesn't show it. She sends out e-mails, too.

"Sometimes I make them funny, because it's not that big a deal," says Boykin, executive assistant to the vice president of communications at the University of Texas at Arlington. "It's nothing for anybody to get mad about."

Still, she says, "When you're in there cleaning it out, sometimes you're stomping and fussing and mumbling the whole time: 'I have to work with a bunch of slobs, rarr-rarr-rarr.' "

Huston says most of us assume that, as grown-ups, we know better than to leave our leftovers around to the point of no return. "But," she says, "people forget, or it's not very important to them. And what may be important to you may not be important to Joe over here, and he's the one with the mold growing on the sandwich."

Laying down the law
The first line of defense against refrigerator rage is a stone-cold icebox policy. But even then, there are no guarantees.

Where could we find a rancor-free fridge? How about the hyper-organized Container Store? We figured the fridge at the company's Coppell headquarters would gleam with shafts of heavenly light, cueing a choir of angels, and causing magnetic poetry pieces to flutter in the air, coming gently to rest on the fridge door, in perfect, Pulitzer Prize-winning stanzas.

It wasn't quite that majestic. But the fridge was a pretty, sleek silver KitchenAid number; inside, there was nary a suspect salad in the lot. Things were organized with the help of a lazy Susan, a drink holder, a serious but amiable policy, and perhaps the real key to harmony: In a drawer by the fridge are markers and freezer tape for labeling. Which everyone uses.

Ah, peace.

But for other offices, the Container Store might as well be a frigid fairy tale.

In Stephanie Wells' office, they used to post a refrigerator sign that's become something of a workplace standard: "Your mother doesn't work here, so you're expected to clean up after yourself."

But they have no set policy, just an occasional note. "We just expect people to clean up after themselves," says Wells, at Tarrant County College.

How's that work?

"Oh, it doesn't, usually."

At Dunne's office, there was one high-tech stab at order. A few years ago, Carmichael Lynch Spong got a fancy Amana fridge from Maytag (the company does PR for Maytag, which sells Amana products). The souped-up contraption allowed people to leave voice messages on the door. "Which, being the person who has refrigerator rage," Dunne says, "I thought was the coolest thing."

Did it help?

"No. Not at all, are you kidding? I don't foresee it ever getting better, if you want to know the truth."

After the Fort Worth Fire Department posted a policy on its door, things got a little better, says Sondra Phillips, administrative assistant in charge of revenue.

Workers are to mark their items with their name, and if they leave it in the fridge for more than a week, it's off to the trash in the weekly purge.

"People do realize that we're serious," Phillips says, "that once a week we'll go through it. Well, I don't think we did it this last week. The lady who kind of oversees it was off. And we'd all rather take a beating than do that."

It's not a buffet
The thankless chore of pawing through the stench is one thing. But at some point in our work lives, we are likely to suffer emotional scars from another refrigerator irritant: lunch theft.

The nerve. The gall. The betrayal.

"We've had stuff disappear," Wells said, ". . . and appear." Like the time boxes and boxes of Little Debbie honey buns turned up in the freezer. No one ever claimed them, so everyone was too creeped out to eat them.

Dunne recalls a day when one of her colleagues brought in a pudding; she had talked about it in the morning wand was looking forward to it all morning. Cut to later that day: "Who ate my pudding? I can't believe someone ate my pudding!"

The fire department's Phillips might have the corner on office food theft.

They are working in a public building, and people wander in and out of their offices from time to time. "We recently had two young ladies come in and help themselves," Phillips said. "They . . . got in the freezer and got out Hot Pockets and put them in the microwave. They were just helping themselves. We all just had our mouths hanging open: You have got to be kidding me."

But most lunch thieves aren't as brazen, and they may not fully comprehend that their actions can cause more than just hunger pangs.

Last year, an Entrepreneur magazine article titled "Fridge Wars" recounted the heartbreaking tale of a missing lunch. The victim fired off an e-mail missive to his colleagues at his Washington, D.C., law firm: "Taken from the eighth floor fridge was more than just a sandwich and some Fritos. Taken was the essence of an individual."

Inside the Frigi-dare
But if you must go in, here are a few rules of thumb from the Fort Worth Fire Department's intrepid Refrigerator Cleaner-Outer Sondra Phillips:

• Open questionable containers with outstretched hands. ("It kinda keeps you from gagging.")
• A cold is not always a bad thing. ("It's probably good that you do this on days that your nose is a little stuffed up.")
• If there's fur, you need not confer. "If you can tell from the outside that there's fuzzy stuff, the whole container just goes in the trash."

Keepin' cool with fridge rules
Some tips to keep your office refrigerator-rage free:

• Can we talk? Establish, communicate and enforce a policy. Include specific rules, duties and deadlines.
• Appoint one person everyone's afraid of: Either that or create and/or rotate merciless lunchroom squads and have them do a clean sweep of the fridge every Friday.
• Labels, people, labels: Require fridge users to label and date foods, and specify when food will be disposed of. Also, display a regular cleaning schedule. Provide markers, freezer tape or other labels.

SOURCE: "Best Practices in HR," a publication of Business & Legal Reports

Fear Factor: The fridge edition
Whatever otherworldly creations are spawning in your office refrigerator, it could still be worse. Way worse. What if you had to navigate the fridge on the set of NBC's popular reality show Fear Factor? According to producer Scott Larsen -- known to the Fear Factor staff as "the gross wrangler," here's what's chilling in the icebox on a regular basis. Seriously.

• 150 frozen scorpions
• 2 pig tongues
• 10 egg sacks
• 50 miscellaneous eyeballs
• 20 pounds of cow spleen
• Three dozen 100-year-old eggs
• 1 half-eaten aardvark
• 1 sheep's head (minus eyes)
• 2 pounds of pig uterus
• 1 gallon of cod liver oil
• 6 bottles of Thai fish paste
• Two large zip-top bags of cockroaches
• Six-pack of orange soda