Scavanging is a well tested past time of both the R&D and CAD group and having moved from one to the other I’m noting the differences in methodologies. In R&D we walked around the building a lot and saw meetings in progress, we’d pass this information on and everytime someone got a drink or used the rest room the target room would be checked until it evacuated and much like the muezzin of a medieval mosque the returning person would issue a call to the congregants to find sustenance.
The CAD group is much more ant-like with each member monitoring a specific area of the building as part of their normal duties. The smoker checks the area between the offices and the front desk, the always-on-cellphone guy monitors the bathrooms to the secret room in the stairwell, the businessy guy monitors the secretaries’ desks and the mad designer checks everything as he storms about talking to people. When one returned with the food the rest of the group knew their covered region and would keep circling until they found it. Once someone returned without food, that person would emit a pheramone that would signal the other ants that the supply was exhausted.
Today, the smoker returned with pizza and based on the plate it was from a marketing meeting which is usually held in a specific room. I went to the conference room and the kitchen manager was there reclaiming paper plates and unconsumed singles like drink cans and bags of chips, but he stopped me from taking pizza.
He told me he was going to bring it back to the kitchen to “prevent waste”. Really? Have we really be reduced to re-heating pizza? I mean, he’s the kitchen manager, if he really wanted pizza he could just have pizza, he wouldn’t have to deprive us of it to get it. How do you recycle pizza? Is he going to make pizza cream soup just like one time he made “fish” chowder followed by cream of starch soup? If he slices them up to create the delightfully ambiguous “cheesy fiesta strips” I’m going to picket.
