The office fridge: an archaeological survey

Site: shared refrigerator, break room, second floor Excavation: one afternoon Team: two, one of whom left at the forty-minute mark and has not discussed it since

#Methodology

We removed nothing. This is important and we want it understood before anyone reads further: this was a survey, not a clean. Nothing was thrown away. Nothing was moved that did not move on its own.

Dating was a problem. Carbon dating was unavailable to us, so we used the free newspaper lining the crisper drawer. It is dated March 2019. We have taken this as our lower bound and we have been conservative from there.

#Layer 1 — Active (0–2 weeks)

Top shelf, front. A yogurt. A salad in a clear container with a name on it in marker.

This layer is alive. Items here have owners, the owners are in the building, and the names correspond to people you could go and speak to. Named items are respected absolutely — we observed no incursion into a named container at any depth of the site. Whatever else is wrong with this culture, it does not eat labelled food.

#Layer 2 — Transitional (2–8 weeks)

Top shelf, rear. This is where it starts.

Items in this layer still have names on them. The names no longer correspond to employees. There is a yogurt marked K. K. left in March. The K. yogurt remains, front-facing, name outward, and the name is doing all of the work — it is the only thing standing between that yogurt and the bin, and it is winning, because nobody has the authority to decide that K. is not coming back for it.

#Layer 3 — Anaerobic (2 months–1 year)

Middle shelf. Containers whose owners have been promoted.

We note a foil parcel of unknown composition, a takeaway box that has fused to the shelf at three points of contact, and something in a jar that has settled into the shape of the space available to it. The jar is unlabelled. The contents are amber. We did not open the jar and we would counsel against opening the jar.

#Layer 4 — Pre-lease

Bottom shelf, rear left.

We checked the lease. The lease begins in 2021. There is material here that we cannot account for under the terms of the lease. We have raised this with facilities and facilities have raised it with the landlord and the landlord has said that the fridge came with the building.

The fridge came with the building.

#Layer 5 — Load-bearing

Bottom shelf, structural.

The survey ended here. A team member attempted to withdraw a single container from the base of the bottom shelf and the shelf above it moved. Not the container. The shelf. Something down there is holding something else up, and the arrangement has been stable for a period we cannot determine, and we made the decision to stop.

This is the point at which the second team member left.

#The condiment door — a separate civilisation

The door does not follow the stratigraphy of the main chamber and must be treated as its own site.

Six mustards. We counted twice. Six.

No mustard in this refrigerator has ever been finished. We can state this with confidence because all six are between one-third and one-half full, which is not a coincidence, it's a pattern, and the pattern tells you what mustard is. Mustard is not acquired to be eaten. Mustard is acquired because a specific sandwich required it once, and then the sandwich ended, and the mustard did not.

There is a hot sauce with a joke name. Nobody has ever laughed at it. It will outlive us.

#Findings

The refrigerator is not a storage device.

It is a mechanism for converting your food into somebody else's problem, slowly, over years, with the door closed. You put something in it believing you will come back. You will not come back. You will be promoted, or you will leave, or you will simply forget, and your yogurt will become an archaeological feature, and one day two people with a clipboard will date it using a newspaper.

#Recommendation

Do not clean it.

We want to be clear that this is our formal recommendation. Cleaning it would require somebody to decide whose things get thrown away. That decision has been deferred by every single person who has ever worked in this building, and after an afternoon on site we have concluded that they were all correct to defer it, and we are deferring it too.

The K. yogurt stays. K. might come back.

Related: performance review: the Sun — another entity nobody has the standing to confront. And if you'd like to watch a small creature demand food that is eaten, immediately, without ceremony: feed the baby.