update: I’m in charge of our disgusting office kitchen

by Alison Green on December 19, 2024

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer who was in charge of a disgusting office kitchen? Here’s the update.

Thank you so much for publishing my letter! When I wrote in earlier this year I was truly at my wits end — quite possibly because of the many other (more important) tasks I was juggling. Cleaning the kitchen was the last thing I wanted to do, the least important thing on my list, and the only thing I could focus on.

Essentially the situation remains the same but the resolution comes from a major attitude adjustment. Instead of jumping up and rushing to clean dirty dishes or empty the food trap when people complain, I mostly just sigh and say, “Yeah these people man. What can ya do?” The person who was complaining usually takes this response as a sign to clean the kitchen themselves which wasn’t what I was expecting at all. Who knew apathy would be my saving grace!

Thank you to the comment thread for your suggestions as well! It seems my struggles are not unique (though I hope the person who noted they would fire an admin who tosses out dirty dishes does some reflection on their priorities…) and it was great to hear I’m not alone in this.
Some details not originally included:

– We do have a dishwasher and I will spare you all the crazy ways I have seen that thing loaded. It is still remarkable to me that people would rather leave spaghetti dishes in the sink instead of popping them into the dishwasher, but who am I to judge? I run the dishwasher at the end of the day and unload it in the morning. If I forget, I forget and the world keeps spinning.
– I do a weekly fridge purge on Fridays (which has been in place since I started but I neglected to mention in my previous letter) but have doubled down that anything unlabeled will be thrown away. We have a large portion of our staff that irregularly work over the weekends and many folks forget to label their leftovers so this is not a perfect system but those who have lost meals to the purge tend to start labeling things in the future.

I have also written up a proposal for a kitchen rotation by department that me and my boss are trying to get off the ground once the dust settles on some other policy changes that are being implemented.

All in all, I still fear for the way people treat their homes if this is how they treat the office, but I have chosen to breathe deep and rise above. Thanks again!

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{ 41 comments }

{ 41 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

    Good for you! My last job had a lot of fridge drama over 2 mini fridges and it was decided anyone who used the fridges would be required to clean them on a rotation. So I just bought an insulated lunch cooler and took myself out of the system. The emails after that were purely entertainment.

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    1. Vacuumer of the turf at SkyDome*

      Just had to comment that I love your username! I grew up in Western New York, and Moxy Fruvous was played on the local college radio station all the time. It still pops into my head all the time and no one here in Illinois has any idea what I am referencing

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      2. Dog momma*

        I lived in WNY for many yrs, south end of Lake Ontario… you? I don’t miss the snow or cold but I DO miss the Finger Lakes and all the great italian food!

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  2. Feral Humanist*

    Sometimes the solution really is “just care less.” So glad that worked out for you!

    I was curious about who would say that they’d fire an admin who threw out dirty dishes, so I went back and looked at the comments from the original, and, um, wow. Some people had better hope karma isn’t real.

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  3. CubeFarmer*

    Funny, I bet people have stopped complaining as soon as they realized they might be responsible for, you know, acting on that complaint.

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    1. learnedthehardway*

      It’s amazing how that happens, isn’t it?

      WRT the dishwasher – some people can play 3D Tetris and others apparently cannot. That’s all I can figure around our house. Left to themselves, other members of our family would have to run the dishwasher 3x a day to get the dishes done. Somehow, I manage to get everything into 1 load.

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  4. Zona the Great*

    This is why I have a teeny tiny desk fridge and a hot lunch box that can cook and heat your food. I get to honestly say I never ever enter the kitchen and will not be helping with kitchen clean up.

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    1. CubeFarmer*

      I bought a $20, plug-in food warmer that I keep at my desk. I keep a labeled bag of frozen lunches (I meal prep at home, freeze, and then haul in a couple of weeks worth on Mondays) ready to plop in my warmer in the morning. I also wash my dishes myself. Removing the need to use the office microwave was huge for me.

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      1. Zona the Great*

        Yep! Hot Logic is the brand I’ve had now for several years. Hasn’t lost a bit of power. Just plug and heat.

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  5. Tom*

    I once worked at a place where everyone had a plastic storage bin in an assigned fridge. your bin was your real estate, you clean it, or watch your stuff rot. You didn’t bring anything that didn’t fit in your box. There were no squabbles.

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      1. sofar*

        I think LW was referring more to plastic pull-out bins? Which is fine. People put saran wrapped/to-go containers/ziplock bags in the fridge all the time. Hardly air tight. In my own home, my fridge drawers aren’t air-tight, and I keep deli meats/cheeses in those. If someone wants air tight storage, they can provide their own containers and put those inside the bins.

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        1. Seashell*

          I think the point is that you don’t want to smell other people’s rotting food when you go in the communal fridge.

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          1. Zephy*

            Yeah, but if the bin with the pile of mold that used to be an orange in it is labeled “Dave,” we all know that’s Dave’s gross science experiment.

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  6. anonymous here*

    Eventually all that food getting washed down the drain will cause a very nasty, very time consuming, and astonishingly expensive clog.

    I work for a large university. Our building is maybe 15 years old. Our sink was out of commission for almost a month while they figured out why it was not draining, what needed to be done for repairs, getting approval for said repairs, and then making the repairs. The clog was not anywhere near the sink itself. And we are a reasonably well-behaved office and clean up after ourselves mostly.

    Maybe that will solve the problem…

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    1. Lily Rowan*

      When I started my job in 2017 — and for several years after — there was a laminated sign over the sink reminding people not to put flower stems or coffee stirrers down the drain. Dated 2001.

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    2. Debydo*

      At an office at an unnamed military base, most of the disgusting clog was enormous roaches, dead and alive. And STILL folks kept putting food waste (coffee grounds, soup dregs, etc.) down the sink! It was one of the most nausea inducing events I ever witnessed.

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        1. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

          This comment could apply to so many things on the net these days! Must remember it for the future.

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  7. Liz the Snackbrarian*

    At one workplace the kitchen was so bad we had an enormous email chain argument over it and one of my coworkers suggested putting cameras in the kitchen. I finally jump in to say “It’s bad but let’s not do that” and then a coworker replied to me something along the lines of “Really Liz what else do you expect us to do!” but in a more heated way. Another coworker saw her in the workroom after that and apparently told her she was coming across as attacking me so about half an hour later there was another email with the subject line “I was not attacking Liz.” The thing is she was otherwise a pretty reasonable human. What a strange time.

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    1. Venus*

      I’m not surprised. Alison has said that kitchen and food problems are by far the least rational of all the problems she’s sent. I wish this wasn’t the case, but it reinforces that your coworkers are behaving like typical humans and we’re all pretty strange :)

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  8. Dawn*

    If it helps your understanding at all, some of us were raised to never, ever put a dish with certain things on it directly into the dishwasher.

    That’s no longer how things work in (almost) 2025, or not nearly so much, but for some of us it got really ingrained – I still struggle sometimes with doing stuff that my dad would have yelled at me for.

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    1. Elizabeth West*

      I still have to force myself not to pre-wash the dish, only rinse it. I don’t like cleaning the filter and I’m paranoid about what goes down the drain since I don’t have a disposal unit and a clog means maintenance has to come into my apartment with their dirty feet (they use sand on snowy and icy areas outside and it never goes away. I am sweeping all the time even with removing my shoes at the door.).

      At Exjob, people would rinse, but then they wouldn’t empty the sink filter in the trash bin. Yecchh!

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  9. Wingo Staww*

    The purge Fridays are so important! We did that at an old job and really nobody resented taking a break from the phones to toss out food.

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    1. Hot Flash Gordon*

      When I would do fridge purge, I forewarned people that I was ruthless. If it wasn’t labeled, it went in the trash (even some tupperware). People would moan to their supervisor about me (because other people who would help clean the fridge would let things slide), but I just pointed to the fridge rules taped on the door of the fridge.

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  10. sofar*

    I once saw one of our executives place, directly in the the office dishwasher, a plate with sandwich crusts still on it.

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  11. Always Tired*

    We fixed our kitchen drama by… (drum roll)

    Moving to an open office where the kitchen is on full display! turns out that when people can see you being a disgusting little monster and comment in real time, you stop doing nasty things like leaving balled up napkins in the sink.

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  12. Older, wiser, but just as petty*

    About 20 years ago, as an Office Manager, after begging and pleading the attorneys in my office to wash their [expletive] coffee cups instead of just leaving them for me in the sink, I started taking every cup that had been left in the sink and hiding it in a box in our storage closet.

    Then when people asked where the mugs were, I just said with a shrug “I guess no one washed any?”

    Petty as hell, 10/10 would do it again.

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    1. Shellfish Constable*

      I love this! I am imagining one of those huge packing boxes with little inserts for glassware so you can stack cups and glasses three or four levels high. Pretty soon, Older, Wiser has a secret box of 60 mugs and nobody in the office gets to drink coffee anymore because they couldn’t be bothered to rinse their f’ing mug. Justice is served.

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  13. BigLawEx*

    I’m feeling a bit lucky. Everywhere I’ve worked, the office cleaners loaded the dishwasher and cleaned the microwave/counter every day.

    The admins did throw out everything on Friday. The only issue was non dishwasher safe items got ruined, but that was on the person who left their stuff in the kitchen.

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  14. Abogado Avocado*

    I used to hate kitchen mess and have been in my share of email chains, but I’ve discovered that when I’m stuck on a work problem or stressed out about one that cleaning up the dirty dishes in the company kitchen is a great way to de-stress. Do I do it every day? No. Are the dishes piled high? No. (We have a really good dishwashing machine.) But I find myself in the kitchen once or twice a week, cleaning the random dishes that end up in the sink. And, to my surprise, I find that just washing some cups and utensils helps me clear my head and get back to the problem at hand, usually with a solution. Who knew?

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  15. Hot Flash Gordon*

    Now that my company is fully remote I’m so glad I don’t have to manage expectations around the office kitchen (although I do miss the second hand drama).

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  16. Disappointed Australien*

    My boss (who owns the company) has a habit of tracking down offenders and discussing their behaviour with them. Or at least he used to, I WFH now but I saw that happen twice in about five years when I was in the office. Something about that experience made people not want a repeat.

    We also have regular but not frequent announcements that the fridges will be emptied after work on a Friday, maybe a couple of times a year. Again, people keep the fridges pretty clean so it’s just the slow accumulation of half-full bottles of tomato sauce or dressing rather than abandoned lunches.

    Reply ↓

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