WorkPlace 101 - The Employee Fridge.

Like most working stiffs, I can neither afford, nor do I have the time to go out for lunch everyday. I sometimes bring leftovers of whatever AverageSis cooked the night before the work, but more times than not, my lunch consists of whatever moderately healthy brand of TV dinner Giant has on sale that week. You know em': Healthy Choice, Smart Ones, Weight Watchers. These "dinners" are usually decent tasting, moderately filling, reasonably okay from a nutritional standpoint, and best of all, cheap. You can usually pickup 5 boxes for about $10, which means a full week of lunches for less than the price of one lunch "out".

Anyways, like any menial office worker, I store my food in the employee fridge, which, as you might imagine, in an oasis of nastiness. Even though the office manager implores everyone to keep the fridge clean, at any given time there are month old containers of yogurt, decaying fruit, and something growing in a Pyrex tray that might as well be a Petri dish. It's just disgusting. Thankfully, all my stuff is frozen, so I get to circumvent all this filth, in favor of the employee freezer.

Since many of my fellow co-workers also buy the same frozen meals at Giant, it's become customary to mark your territory boxes with your initials to avoid any confusion. I will often use a Sharpie and write my entire name all over the box, just to avoid any "issues". But it doesn't matter: people, not matter how well paid, will still steal your food if it's in there. And these people seriously disgust me.

I mean, come on: you are a grown (wo)man. It is not my responsibility to feed you. What sorta person steals a $2 frozen dinner from a hungry co-worker? The other day, I had my mouth all watered for that last Beef Merlot, and damnit, it was gone, gone, gone, but I had no sniff-intific evidence to lead me to just who'd be brazen enough to do such a thing. And that really sucks.

Question: How do you deal with fellow employees who steal other people's food from the employee fridge? Are you an employee fridge their yourself?