Kitchen Flee Market

My office, like I suspect many offices do, has a kitchen. It’s a typical office kitchen: lazy people leave their dirty dishes in the sink even though the dishwasher is right next to it; the refrigeration is probably half full of long forgetting (and expired) food; and it’s not really the place you want to sit and actually eat lunch because of the various smells coming from the two microwave between the hours of 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Our kitchen also has two round tables and a couple of chairs, even though nobody ever really uses them. But the tables have become a place to put items that you are willing to give away. Often times it’s old office supplies or swag (shirts with an old company logo or used 3-ring binders). But in the past few weeks I’ve learned that you can pretty much put anything on those tables and someone will take it.

Just last week I went into the kitchen and saw two big cans of pumpkin sitting on the table for anyone who needed pumpkin and wanted to get a head start on this year’s Thanksgiving pies. Three hours later I went back in and they were gone. Yes, canned pumpkin. Any food items, it seems, will go fast. I have also contributed to this kitchen flee market. I bought some granola bars that, unbeknownst to me, had coconut in them. Since I don’t like coconut I put them on the kitchen table and proceeded to get myself a some water from the watercooler. Before I had even left the kitchen three of them were gone.

I have a small lamp on my desk and bought the wrong type of light bulbs for it. I had mistakenly bought chandelier bulbs. I had already opened the package and since they were only $5 I decided not to return them but put them on the kitchen table. They were gone later that day. Apparently someone in my office has a chandelier and needed light bulbs for it. Go figure.

So now I think I’m going to do some spring cleaning. I don’t have a lot of crap in my apartment (there isn’t a lot of storage room) but I do have some things (think White Elephant-type gifts) that I am going to put on the table and see how long they take to disappear. I’ll keep you updated.