Leaving dirty dishes in a shared office kitchen for someone else to clean up screams, 'My time is far more important than yours.' Photo / Getty Images
Leaving dirty dishes in a shared office kitchen for someone else to clean up screams, 'My time is far more important than yours.' Photo / Getty Images
Joanna Wane is a senior feature writer who would never leave an empty wine glass or popcorn packet for someone else to pick up after her when she goes to the movies
OPINION
So it’s come to this. For the first time in a career spanning four decades, I’m contemplatingputting up a Post-it note in the office kitchen.
It’d be one of those passive-aggressive ones I always suspect have been written by mothers of a certain age who’ve made a vow never to clean up after someone else ever again. Oops, that does sound like me.
Communal kitchens are the scene of many egregious crimes. The milk stuffed back into the fridge with a dribble left in the bottle. The miscellaneous crap people put in the recycling bin. The streaks of Vegemite in someone’s tub of butter. The theft of some Rush Munro ice cream I’d been hoarding in the freezer for weeks.
What finally tipped me over the edge was the guy who strode past and dumped his mug on the bench, leaving dregs of hot chocolate to congeal in the bottom of the cup.
“Dude!” I screamed at him (internally – it’s an open-plan office). “Just put it in the bloody dishwasher!”
Yes, there’s a dishwasher in the kitchen. In fact, there are two. No actual hand-washing required. Yet even when the sign is flipped to “Fill me”, dirty plates and bowls often clog up the sink, wallowing in a fetid, watery soup.
Obviously, that is just gross. It’s also grossly self-entitled – the assumption that someone far less important, whose time is less precious, will pick up after you. It’s not all on men and millennials, either. I’ve busted women old enough to know better joining the pile-on like trolls on Twitter.
Tempting as it might be to stab someone in the arm with a fork, the way Béatrice Dalle did in Betty Blue, that’s apparently against office etiquette, too.
So, I turned to the internet for some tips on something suitably cutting to say. “Your mother doesn’t work here, do your own dishes” – too obvious. “The dish fairy is on vacation” – too naff.
No kittens were harmed in the writing of this column.
This one, I liked: “Every time you don’t wash your dishes, god kills a kitten.” Apparently it’s pretty effective. The woman who posted that note in her office kitchen hands out a cartoon picture of a dead cat whenever she finds dirty dishes in the sink.
Still, I’m a conflict-avoidant people-pleaser so I’ll probably just keep stewing in silence. No one likes being a nag and we’ve become a very telling-off sort of society lately. Maybe, in this unpredictable world, it’s the desire to regain some kind of control.
One poor guy posted on Reddit about flying long-distance to New York, arriving late that night at the private room he’d booked on Airbnb. The next morning, he woke to find his host had slipped a curt note under the door.
“After your flight, you had a strong odour yet you didn’t take a shower before going to bed,” she wrote, threatening to lay an official complaint. “As the owner of the room, the bed and the sheets, I am extremely displeased with this fact.”
Last year, a TikTok reel went viral about a holiday rental apartment where “every room and surface” was covered in laminated edicts, written in capital letters with yellow highlights and underlining for added emphasis. “DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN.” “DO NOT TOUCH OR MOVE FOR ANY REASON.”
I came across something similar in Ōamaru recently, when a group of us emerged from riding the Alps 2 Ocean Cycle Trail and checked into a large house on the hill above town, with sweeping views of the sea. Bossy little notes were plastered all over the place.
On the wall by the dining table, three large canvases spelt out the word EAT. Even that felt less like an invitation and more like a command. After a few wines with dinner, we weren’t in the mood to be told what to do.
Giggling like naughty schoolchildren, we swapped the letters around to spell ATE, before finally settling on TEA.
It was, to quote Front Lawn, a small act of defiance. I still wonder occasionally if anyone noticed. But we left the kitchen spotless.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
