On the Defence

Day 25 - 7:52am, 25th January 2019

A poem appears in my memories on Facebook this morning. It makes me smile. I wrote it about a year ago when I opened a jar of hot chocolate for the first time and found that there was a "contents may settle during transit" message on endless repeat across the foil.

A year on, and it is the catering staff at work that seem to be worried how users may react, deciding a pre-emptive message is required before all hell breaks loose. I can only assume that they think the news that the milk is now being kept in the fridge by the coffee machine will prompt some sort of revolution or be the source of numerous complaints - milk in the fridge, by heavens!

A piece of headed paper has been stuck to the machine, which announces in large capital letters and a new font colour that it is a "Polite Notice." I can't remember the exact wording of what it says, only that it is awkwardly written and contains double the amount of words that it needs to. Basically, what it amounts to is that the milk should be kept in the fridge by the coffee machine, not on the counter top as it has until now. It ends with the allergen advice that the milk may contain milk.

I am interested to find out how they scale up from a polite notice. Is the next one going to contain swear words? Will it be a 'by order' and if so, by whom? It is a sad state of affairs that we should be reduced to this sort of paranoia-induced bureaucracy.

Why is it that everybody feels the need to be on the defence? Give us all a little credit. Surely, a post-it note saying "Milk in fridge" would have sufficed so that people knew where to look the first time they saw it wasn't on the counter. Especially given that most people circumvent the counter-top milk and head for the fresh milk in the fridge anyway.