The Jew in the Fridge

Merry Fridge Cleaning Everyone! Can you believe it is the ‘second bi-monthly fridge cleaning for my office building’ already?? I must not have even noticed the Fridge Cleaning carollers singing from fridge door to door , I have not even purchased my Happy Fridge Cleaning cards and I have no idea what to buy my Fridge Kindle...

If you missed this significant event here is the email I received this morning heralding the important event:

Please be advised that this Friday 12th February (tomorrow), Cleaning Services will be conducting the second bi-monthly fridge cleaning on each floor.

Please be aware that any food (sandwiches, yoghurts etc) and containers will be thrown out on this date regardless of food used by dates. Contents that will remain 'safe' in the fridge and not thrown out are butters, sauces, milk, and jams.

Any personal items (tupperware, breads etc) and foods if you wish to keep, please remove each Friday bi-monthly cleaning date.

Kind regards

Facilities Management Helpdesk

As always ordinary office tasks take on the importance of a major event requiring planning appropriate to a major military operation. You are not invading Normandy – you are cleaning a fridge!

There are so many aspects of this email that have caused me to roll me eyes in disbelief. Bread is apparently a personal item akin to Tupperware. Bread is not personal - it’s perishable. Yogurt, regardless of the use-by date, is going to be expunged from the fridge forthwith. Seems a bit harsh. Can’t we settle our differences and get along. If yogurt is allowed to live alongside butters, sauces and jams we truly would have a multicultural fridge... I feel compelled to rescue the innocent yogurt tubs caught in the middle of this highly organised hygiene holocaust. I wonder if it is worth hiding some yogurt inside some Tupperware in an Anne Frank-in-the-attic attempt to evade the cruel clutches of the fridge-cleaning Gestapo? Similarly, in a desperate attempt to have their lives spared, bottles of Yakult could have small signs hanging from their necks reading, “We are not yogurt – we are but innocent milk infused with Dr Shirota’s special Shirota bacteria strain.”

I just hope this crisis can be resolved quicker than the explosive time a decomposing loaf of Helga’s bread was discovered on the middle shelf of the fridge, an incident forever remembered as the Middle Yeast Crisis of 2007...