What danger lurks in your community refrigerator?
From the department of totally gross stories comes this dispatch from the Associated Press.
“An office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital and made many others ill.
Firefighters had to evacuate the AT&T building in downtown San Jose on Tuesday after the fumes led someone to call 911. A hazmat team was called in.
What crews found was an unplugged refrigerator crammed with moldy food.”
Our community refrigerator (we have two, actually) in the newsroom has been known to get pretty nasty. There are times when you open the door that the smell of rotting food or soured milk makes your eyes water and your gag reflex …well, gag. I can honestly say I am not an offender. If I bring my lunch and don’t eat it within a day or two, I pitch it. I don’t want to worry about leaving a piece of grilled chicken or a bowl of pasta salad only to have it morph into something green and furry.
How’s the state of your office, workshop, or lounge fridge? Go ahead, give us details about what you’ve found, what’s been abandoned or just how bad it can be.
It is used by people in the office and it is clean,clean,clean. I won’t have it any other way. Now the two in the lunch room for the plant employees is a different story. I’m afraid to open the door on either one of them back there. It’s a different class of people from the office to the plant. Eating something out of a dirty frig is gross.
First Tom, I couldn’t agree more about eating from a dirty fridge. It’s just nasty. I clean mine at home at least every couple of weeks.
Everything is pitched on Friday afternoon. If we want our food or it’s container, we get it out before then.
I think the AP story was more about the worker using “two cleaning chemicals to scrub down the mess.” Mixing household cleaners is a fast way to send up a toxic cloud – whether you’re cleaning a nasty fridge or just mixing them in a clean bucket. In fact, in Japan, mixing cleaners in a bathroom sink is a popular suicide method.
Anyway, as for rotten office fridges, ours is pretty good. Every time it gets even a bit questionable, we have a “clean out weekend” – which means everything left in the fridge gets tossed late Friday. Fridges need to be periodically emptied – otherwise nasty things stay in the dark corners
If you’re afraid to open it how do you know it isn’t as clean as your class of people’s fridge? Maybe you’re just afraid of those people “back there” where no one has to look at them-maybe, just a little?
Just several heads. Don’t tell anyone, though.
numbedout, After reading your post, I went back and opened the doors. The people that use those refrigerators should be afraid to eat out of them. Because of this blog topic, a notice will go out will all paychecks this week to clean your excess baggage out of the refrigerators. This has been an eye opener. Maybe we have been contributing to some of the employees bad health problems by allowing them to be such pigs.
As gross as the inside of those things are…(not to mention the daily food thefts) I wouldn’t store a piece of **** in one.
Sugar. Obama and his people says it’s a danger.
Boy, I’m sure glad they assigned this story to a reporter capable of handling it.