So, basically, you want me to take your garbage home?

Happy Friday!

I love Fridays.  Friday is an Elsie free day at work.  Everyone smiles a bit more.  Everyone is more relaxed.  Biggest good thing:  The office doesn't smell like fish.

This week the recycling issue at the office came to a head, mostly because no one, not even Elsie, could ignore the gigantic bag of soup cans, tuna cans, cottage cheese containers, yogurt containers, and...well, you get the idea..and all of this was shoved under the kitchen sink.

Her rolling cooler in the kitchen.  Sorry about the angle.  You'll
Also note the empty soda bottle, the open drawers, and the
napkins on the floor.  This is how she leaves an area
customers can see.

Several weeks ago, Elsie and I had a conversation about recyling.  I recycle at home, a lot.  Anything I use at the office I take home and put in my recycle bin, since there is no such bin at the office.

This is what she leaves every night.  Yes,
that's a tuna can.

Not Elsie.  Elsie lets the cans sit in the sink until NBM can no longer stand the mess and then she throws them out.  I suggested she do like I did, take them home and deal with her recycling there.

"Oh no," says she, "I have way too much junk at home, I'm not putting more junk in my car and bringing it home."

Let's remember, we're talking about recycling items here.

So I let it go.  Now, for the last couple  weeks, she's been stashing her soup cans and whatnot in a brown paper bag under the sink.  (We just got rid of the fruit flies...seriously....)  This week, she decided to "clean."  (Read here, she didn't feel like doing her actual job, so she made some busy work for herself by tidying up the mess she creates.)  What she did was pull the garbage out from under the kitchen sink  (70% hers) and the recylcing bag  (100% hers.)  She then went to NBM and had this conversation with him:

the infamous George Foreman grill, exiled to the top
of my file cabinets.

Forget that I spend a lot of my day working with the filing
cabinets.  I have to work around...this.

"Will you take the recycling home with you and put it in your bins?  I have had some construction done at my house and the stupid contractors buried my bins in my garage and I can't find them."

(The construction in question is remodeling that she's having done in the taxpayer's dime thanks to some fairly lax regulations.  I can't afford to put pipes in my house that don't spew sewer once every four months, but she gets a whole new kitchen, thanks to the taxpayers of her home county.  Oh, and she's suing the contractors because they made a mess in her kitchen.  First ponder the irony of that.  Then ponder this:  she told me "If I'd been paying for this job, i wouldn't be paying for it.  But since it's county money...I guess they just wanted the bottom dollar and didn't care how good the group was at cleaning up."

Yes, your tax dollar at work.)

Anyway, NBM of COURSE turned her down.  And apparently it was a day when she was talking me not and not to PM because her next stop was at my desk, "So can you take the recycling home and put it in your bins?"

"No," says I, "see, I recycle a lot and my bins are full because I take all my containers, cans, bottles, whatever home with me.  I'm not taking your stuff home."

She was actually miffed that I didn't say yes.

The brown bag is recycling.
And yes, that's one of my file cabinets.

So she did what any green minded person would do:  She plopped that bag next to the garbage.  No, she didn't walk the 22 steps to the dumpster to put everything in the dumpster.  Instead, she dropped the stinky, fishy mess next to one of my file cabinets.  There, she was certain, fairies would find it and take it to....where ever, it didn't matter.

I don't have pictures of Elsie, but I am sharing with you some other shots I've taken around the office.  Enjoy!

CONDA UPDATE!
okay, so this time around Conda had 18 days to lose 13 pounds.  She lost 14, if memory serves.  I gave myself 9 days, half.  Half of 14 is 7, so in 9 days I had to lose 3.5 pounds.  I lost just over one.  Conda wins this round.