Porridge

For reasons that I cannot understand, given my office is staffed with seemingly fully grown adults, there is usually a pile of dishes and mugs left near the sink, despite the fact that we have two dishwashers. Some people also seem to fail to rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, so they sometimes come out with bits of food still on them. There have been countless emails about how nobody's mum is going to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and we're all grown adults so we should be able to clean up after ourselves. My contribution was a picture of a sad-looking puppy with the caption "Dirty dishes make this puppy sad." Unfortunately, it hasn't done much to solve the problem, and the company decided to hire some cleaners to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and empty them.

It seems that isn't enough. Another angry email went out today, along with a photo of a couple of mugs near the sink. In reply to that, someone wrote:

"I just put the dirty dishes away.

It took me 15 minutes, which I estimate cost $50. Given that I probably don't earn as much as anyone else here, perhaps it's worth hiring a cleaner. 

Also, if you are eating porridge, you should rinse your bowl out before putting it in the dishwasher. 

If I catch anyone putting a dirty porridge bowl in the sink, I will take it out and force them to eat it with their dirty spoon."

I had heard that she (the sender) was blunt, but this was my first interaction with her. I was actually astonished that she would send out such an email. For one, that is such an aggressive email to be sending out. She's also fairly new to the company, so it's not like she has built up rapport with people to be able to say things like that. Also, seeing as I'm one of the seemingly few people who don't earn as much as she does (unlikely), I found that comment really snarky. I really doubt that she thinks she earns the least out of everyone on the floor, especially when she sees us junior people around. Given her rough estimate, she makes $249600 per year. We added the salary of all the grads and interns on our floor, and we together, the four of us don't even make that much.

Now, whenever I see her getting a coffee or something like that, I can't help but think, "Damn, well there goes another $20." I can kinda see why they don't encourage people sharing how much they get paid.

I've never really had a problem telling the other grads and interns how much I earn. I feel like we are roughly in the same bracket, although I am a year ahead of them, so it'd be understandable if I made more. I guess we just all band together. When we were rolling off the grad program, we were all just glad that someone was willing to hire us, so none of us really negotiated our salaries. Now we're all a little bit wiser, so we're trying to help each other out.

But back to the porridge. One of the senior developers on my team wants to organise a porridge day, where he will bring in a big bag of oats, and we all make porridge for breakfast. While I am usually happy to join him in office pranks, I don't think he has any idea what he's getting into. I tried very hard to discourage him, but I get the feeling that he's one of those people who hates it when someone tries to tell him what to do.

Note: When I say office pranks, I don't mean anything cruel. Some of the things I've done include: making mugs with my boss's face on them saying World's Best Boss, and organising a meeting with all the developers where we drink out of these mugs and see how long it takes him to notice; or cover someone's desk with balloons and streamers on their birthday.

I'm actually a bit worried about this developer now. I have the worst poker face, and as soon as he suggested the porridge thing, my face lit up like it was the best idea ever. I tried to suppress it, and tell him it was a terrible idea, but I'm pretty sure he knew what I was really thinking. I have the day off on Friday, so I hope he doesn't do anything stupid while I'm not there. Damn, I should have told him that I wasn't in so that he would be doubly motivated not to do anything. Oh well, since I get in before him, he should see that I'm not around, so he'll keep the oats to himself, and I'll deal with this on Monday.