This story originally appeared in the April 14, 2011, issue of The Trussville Tribune…
I’m not much of a soft drink drinker. I don’t keep them around the house, and ever since kicking a mid-morning soft-drink-and-crackers habit I’d gotten into, I don’t drink them at the office anymore. The calories were catching up with me, and the carbonation kept me burping (excuse me) until lunchtime.
Sweet tea and coffee are my preferred poisons, and I can never seem to get enough of those. But soft drinks? I can take ‘em or leave ‘em, and I mostly leave ‘em. So imagine my surprise when a recent attempt to streamline the soft drink selection at the office caused an outcry akin to the ruckus caused by last year’s Gulf oil spill.
It started when the secretary designated “office grocery shopper” left the firm. With no immediate plans to hire a replacement, the bosses doled out her duties among other staff members, and stocking the break room refrigerator fell to me.
I had no problem with the arrangement. After all, what woman doesn’t like to shop – and with somebody else’s credit card, at that? Trips to the store would also allow me to escape the confines of the office on occasion, and as much as I like my work, a shopping break is never a bad thing.
So I happily launched into my new responsibility by taking inventory and making a list of things we needed. That’s when I realized the firm was not only providing a water cooler, several kinds of coffee, iced tea (sweet and artificially sweetened), hot chocolate and flavored vitamin water, but EIGHT kinds of soft drinks as well.
All that seemed excessive for an office of fifteen people, but I figured my tendency to squeeze a dollar, no matter whose dollar it is, might be driving my thoughts on the matter. So I contacted former co-workers and a couple of office managers at other firms for some outside opinions. As it turned out, every person I polled expressed astonishment at the generous amount and variety of liquid refreshment our firm provided, and several even offered to rush right over and assist with the overflow.
So I naively sent out an interoffice soft drink survey, trying to fairly determine what could be struck from the lineup. And that’s when the uproar began. You would have thought I was proposing to cut off the oxygen supply to the building instead of trying to trim the soft drink selection. Folks got downright hostile.
Some perceived the idea to be miserly on the bosses’ part. I quickly assured them I was the miserly one. Others whined, apparently believing the prospect of doing without his or her favorite soft drink while others got theirs was deprivation, not to mention employee discrimination, of the highest order.
Yet others complained because, well, they complain about everything and didn’t want to miss out on such a golden opportunity to carp. For a few days I huddled in my cubicle, unused to being cast in the role of office pariah, desperately trying to lay low until the dust settled. My people-pleasing nature had run slap up against what little business sense I possess, and the inner turmoil was upsetting, to say the least.
When all was said and done, we managed to limit the soft drink selection to a mere six kinds of soft drinks, which is still a lot, if you ask me. But the soft drink drinkers at the office obviously aren’t interested in my point of view.
And while I can now see the humor in the whole episode, I’m serious when I say I won’t be sharing my opinions on such matters in the future. Anyone who knows me knows I sometimes have a hard time keeping my mouth shut, but in this case, self-preservation is a powerful motivator. In fact, just to be on the safe side, if the subject of soft drinks ever comes up at the office again, I think I’ll just crawl under my desk and hide.
Somewhere in the Middle 