holiday snacks

i've been a little sick the last few days. i think i caught something when, against my better judgment, i ate some scones that someone had set out in the breakroom at work. there's no telling how many hands were in that plastic bag before mine and there's no telling where all those hands had been just minutes before.

today was an awfully slow day, so to fill the time, i resorted to surfing the net. one of the sites i visited was the IRS website to figure out how to file my taxes this year. i printed out several forms and instructions and as i was walking to pick up my print outs, i noticed some more snacks set out, but this time in a cubicle.

i've never worked in an office with cubicles before. it's a strange thing to me. fifteen people might all work just feet away from each other, separated by walls no thicker than an inch. i can hear people take phone calls three cubicles away. as close as everyone is, i really only interact with two or three people. the set of twenty cubicles where i sit constitutes a department and there are maybe ten departments on the whole floor.

the breakroom where i picked up the scones really is a general area, but the cubicle i saw the snacks in must have belonged to another department. the people who work around this cubicle had lots of test equipment setup with wires and probes all over the place. kind of impressive. the people who work in my area only have computers and nerf guns.

i wondered if it was in poor taste to pick up snacks from a cubicle in a department of people i've never met. there's not really any physical distinction which names this area "Test" and that area "ASIC". and we all work in the same place...

i contemplated this for a few minutes. i had printed out my IRS documents in several sets and since i had nothing better to do, i made several trips to the printer which meant i made several trips past these snacks. not that i had to walk this way. i could have taken an entirely different route. but with each trip, i made a survey of how i could discretely go into this cubicle, grab something, then walk out without being noticed. after glimpsing how people were facing in their cubicles, it seemed the best strategy would be to pick up a snack on the way back to my desk.

on the last trip to the printer, i decided that it was probably not polite to pick up snacks from people i've never met, which is why i was going to pick some up on the way back to my desk without getting noticed. i walked to the printer, making a mental note of what i was going to take, picked up my print out, then walked back, into the cubicle and went for it. i picked up a piece of fudge and a ferrero rocher chocolate. i made a little noise as i was fussing with the ferrero rocher package, but i made it back to my desk undetected.

success!