Paradise Found

Happy New Year! ‘Tis the season for diets and dynamic gym sessions. It’s also the time when people offload their unwanted unhealthy foods in at the office in the hope that others will eat them.

Usually this is a box of chocolates or a tin of biscuits (cookies), but it is a puzzle to me when I see “cakes in the kitchen” emails being circulated, especially when the cakes turn out to be home-made, and it is not anyone’s birthday.

Why would someone offload their home-made baked goods at the office? Is it because:

• they have had a disagreement with management and have decided to “go postal” using the indirect route of poisoning their colleagues as a first step?
• they dropped the whole batch on the floor at home, or had their pet Jack Russell lick the cake-tin, so they decided to give them out to their unsuspecting co-workers using the logic “what they don’t know can’t hurt them?”
• they aren’t very good at reading and mistakenly put the dark super-effective laxative chocolate into the mix instead of the Belgian luxury stuff?
• they misjudged the quantities when baking for their obese relatives and realised that even uncle “Sumo” Jim can only eat 10lbs of sweet chocolate sponge?
• they are genuinely nice people who always think of their co-workers when baking at home?

Call me paranoid, but I never believe that the last option above could be true. As a result I am always wary of those free frosted fingers of sponge, and let someone else take one first – in case they keel over with some sort of virus that only Dr. House could diagnose. If they are still living after 30 minutes I will then go back and grab a plate full. The good thing is, if I do not happen to eat it all, I can always take it home and feed it to Hamish the Cat. Anything he only half eats can be topped with some Smarties or M&Ms and the brought back into the office a few weeks later…