Tuesday, June 23, 1998

The scariest thing in many offices is the scuzzy fridge

By ELEENA DE LISSER The Wall Street Journal

A monster is lurking in the break rooms of companies across the nation. It's the office refrigerator, bulging at the seams as leftover plastic-foam boxes and forgotten Tupperware containers fight for space with open cans of Coke and rotting fruit.

Once situated in an office environment, the household appliances so comfortable at home can become truly frightening.

Marc Gendron in San Francisco didn't think condiments could go bad until he tried to use some mustard and ketchup from the office fridge shared by 60 people. The ketchup was putrid, and the mustard looked fossilized - browner than it ought to be.

"I thought these things had the shelf life of a Twinkie," Gendron says. "After this sort of experience, you don't put anything directly on your food until you test it first."

But crusty condiments are nothing compared to what Kay Norberg has seen at S&S Public Relations in Northbrook, Ill. Sure, there was moldy fruit salad, but what really got to her was the frozen lizard.

It turns out that the reptile, a one-eyed Bearded Dragon named Liz, had died in her sleep and her owner, Allison Clark, wanted to have her autopsied.

"I didn't have time to go to the veterinarian before work, so I brought Liz in a shoe box and put her in the freezer here," Clark says.

But Norberg, who calls herself the "office mom" because she is always picking up after her co-workers, had no idea whom the cryogenic creature belonged to. After several days, she finally sent out an office e-mail that said: "The fridge needs to be cleaned out before the weekend, and, by the way, somebody has got a lizard in there. What are we doing with this thing?"

What indeed. The problem, of course, is that while everyone contributes to the mess in an office fridge, few take ownership of what's inside.

At the biweekly "What's the beef?" staff meeting at Tsantes & Associates, everyone gripes about how nasty the office fridge is. But none of the 20 people who work at the Campbell, Calif., firm want to take responsibility. So when Diane Orr, a vice president who doubles as the fridge cleaning-lady, decided to excavate recently, there were plenty of odd treasures. Like an old lunch belonging to an employee who quit months earlier.

But it was the contents of the Ziploc bag that created the big mystery. Was it an old pair of socks? Or perhaps something from Fruit of the Loom? As workers steered clear of touching the bag, there were teasing accusations. For example: "Oh, are you the one having underwear for lunch?" After several days of this, the rightful owner limped forward to admit that it was an Ace bandage for his sprained ankle.

Harry Balzer of NPD Group, a Rosemont, Ill., market-research firm that studies American eating habits, blames the rise of the cruddy office refrigerator on the microwave oven.

In the old days, people would bring a Thermos and a bag lunch to work with stuff in it like potato chips, an apple, cookies and sandwiches nobody thought to refrigerate. Now, because people nuke their lunches, they will tote in restaurant leftovers and frozen entrees that need to be chilled until consumed.

Taking a more sociological view, Steven J. Brams, a professor of politics at New York University, attributes the multiplying mold to a "free rider" effect. As he puts it, it's "the idea that you don't have to pay for a public good or something that everybody can share." In other words, Brams explains, "you'd be a sucker" to clean up after others.

Karen Johnson concedes she falls into that category. A "policy wonk" and "chief of the kitchen police" at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington, D.C., Johnson refuses to use the fridge in her office because it gets so gross. But somehow she always winds up cleaning it on what she calls a "day of purging."

"I've tried going as long as three months, thinking somebody who puts food in there will get so disgusted that they will do it. But it never happens," says Johnson, who has begged and browbeaten her co-workers to do the right thing, but to no avail. "They outwait me every time. They know sooner or later I'll clean it."

That isn't to say Johnson's efforts go unappreciated. "I always get e-mails that say 'Thank You' or 'Hurray for Karen!' but then in two weeks we're just back where we started," she says.

But many employees say they don't volunteer to clean out the office fridge because they don't want to disturb someone else's property.

And if a rotten smell or mold is not present, it can be hard to determine just how long an item of unknown provenance has been in the fridge. The chicken noodle soup that is beginning to look more like split pea may still be edible by some people's definition.

Maryann Finiw, a principal at Design Continuum Inc., a design-consulting firm in West Newton, Mass., places the blame on design confusion, not malice: "There are no products specifically designed for an office kitchen."

Finiw says appliance manufacturers could address the problem by making a fridge with multiple-storage minilockers that could be labeled for communal and personal items. She also suggests greatly shrinking the freezer side since it gets much less use in offices.

But representatives at Whirlpool Corp. and General Electric Co., two appliance manufacturers, say they have no plans to develop a fridge specifically for an office setting. Carolyn Verweyst, a Whirlpool spokeswoman, says it would be expensive to retool its assembly lines to make such a product, while Julie Wood, a GE spokeswoman, says her company hasn't heard from consumers that such an appliance is needed.

That may be because they aren't listening. In the real world, territorial squabbles erupt as people mark their food with Post-It notes. And with the fridge bulging with so much food, some hungry workers see the contents as communal property free for the taking.

David W. Patti, president of the Pennsylvania Chemical Industry Council, a trade organization, calls it the "Lord of the Castle" rule. He admits to eating leftover pizza and other food left in the office refrigerator if he is working at night or on weekends. And he has an answer ready for anybody who questions him about it: "If you wanted it, you should've taken it home with you!"

But pilferers, beware. A Susan Reiva might be working at your company. The 32-year-old Los Angeles legal secretary, annoyed that her Carnation Coffee-mate seemed to be disappearing, took drastic action and then attached a warning note: "Do not drink this. Reiva has spit in it. See Russ as my witness."

Reiva admits what she did was "really quite disgusting" but says she needed to do something dramatic to get the attorneys at her firm to stop using her coffee creamer.

The one-shot strategy worked for her. But Russell Ritchie, her co-worker and repulsed witness, says the problem continues for others.

"The creamers are still being drained," he says.

Some of the warfare can split companies in two. At GoldMine Software Corp. in Pacific Palisades, Calif., an internecine battle raged for years between the technical-support and sales staffs.

The salespeople blamed the techs for creating the fridge's smelly, sticky conditions. And because of their weird working hours, the techs were prime suspects when food disappeared. Brenda Christensen once left a burrito in the fridge and came back to find bite marks on it.

"What kind of person would eat somebody's leftovers?" she exclaims.

But when the technical staff moved to another floor, the problem with the sales group's fridge persisted. Indeed, it got so disgusting that a GoldMine executive sought outside help: He brought in his cleaning lady from home to take care of the office kitchen.

She does clean the kitchen, but she won't do the refrigerator. Says LaQuita Washington, GoldMine's human-resources manager and de facto fridge monitor: "She mentioned a couple of times that she found it scary."