Just Nuts

Visitors to the office in which I work are often surprised to discover how humble it is. I think they expect some combination of a call centre filled with busy cubicles and a television studio with banks of expensive equipment and flashing lights - when, in reality, we operate out of a not particularly imposing Queenslander, and just half of the downstairs of it at that. After all, subtitling isn't that high tech - all you need is a VCR (albeit a pretty posh one), a computer, a dictionary and a pair of headphones. And, seeing as our roster can be pretty sparse (only two of us have worked here today), that's pretty much all our wee office-ette contains.

You may therefore not be surprised to learn that we also only have one fork. How this came about is something of a mystery - did we always only have one fork, or have they gradually been bumped off? - but I think at least it's very telling about human nature. That is, rather than BUY other forks, we will:

- actively aim to bring food that doesn't require forking
- stagger our lunch breaks so the fork can be equitably rotated between us
- if fork is occupied, use other cutlery (even, once, a corkscrew) in its place
- HIDE the fork in other parts of the kitchen to prevent others accessing it

And that includes me. What makes this all really sad is that a veritable cornucopia of fully serviceable forks, our local convenience store, is but a hop, skip and a jump from our front door. There's nothing wrong with us, really.