An Easter experiment

One of the government supervisors in my office is out all this week. I have to walk past her office several times every day going back and forth from the main office entrance to my cubicle. This morning, passing her doorway, I noticed several things:

- Her door was standing open.
- The candy basket on her desk had been refilled.
- I mean, like, SERIOUSLY refilled.


Candy baskets or dishes or jars or whathaveyou are certainly a pretty commonplace feature of modern American offices environments. When a person keeps a stash of sweets on their desk, it’s usually for one of two semi-official purposes: to make visitors feel welcome and at ease, a sort of insta-gratifying form of hospitality, if the person in question is some kind of authority figure who can make people nervous simply by asking them to swing by; or to actually encourage (read: bribe) people to detour over to the person’s desk and say hello, if the person in question is in some kind of drudgery-based role that requires little to no human interaction. (Unofficially, the candy supply may simply exist because the person who sits at that desk likes to eat it themselves, and does just that, and goes through the motions of sharing in a fairly passive way so as not to seem piggish.)

Obviously my supervisor is in the first of the two hypothetical positions above, and just as obviously she is not going to be calling anybody into her office this week. In fact, while her door remains open the lights in her office are extinguished and it is very clearly a room not currently in use. And yet, there is a small mountain of single-serving chocolates rising like Kitkatmanjaro above the Serengeti of her workspace. It’s hard to miss, too, because Easter candy is in season now and the individual wrappers are somehow simultaneously pastel and mega-bright. And it is totally devoid of any socializing context. The mini-Twixes and Reese’s chocolate peanut butter eggs are not something people might idly sample while dropping off paperwork for a supervisor’s signature, or any other pretense. As of today, if someone eats that candy it’s because they went to an office they know is empty for the express purpose of harvesting snacky-snacks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I am curious to see how quickly the locusts work at razing the chocolate edifice. My money’s on mid-day tomorrow being the point at which I can see the bottom of the candy basket from the hall. Then everyone will be well goofballed on choco-sugar and several days away from our supervisor returning and replenishing the supply. That’s when the real trials and tribulations will begin. So maybe it’s more of a Passover experiment, at that.