Cooking Hamburgers in the Office Kitchen
I never meant to become a hateful person. I never meant to become one of those people. I blame the office accountant. If it wasn't for him, then none of this would have happened.
It just goes to show: you can never tell the trajectory of your own life.
And, yes ... I started cooking hamburgers in the office kitchen.
We work (well, used to. This happened a few years ago) above a supermarket. It's one of those small malls that have a supermarket, some specialty shops, a few medical centres, and some office space. Great if you lived in the area, but you wouldn't bother visiting if you didn't.
One day I came into work and the accountant was frying eggs on the sandwich press.
This blew my mind. I had no idea you could cook something that wasn't a sandwich on these things. He was quite happy, and the entire office stank of fried eggs. I hate the stench of eggs, always have. I don't know why. I hate the look of them, hate the smell, hate the taste, hate the grease they left behind. But, anyway, here he was cooking eggs.
Not only was he the accountant, but he was the head of HR, as well. So if the head of HR is cooking up eggs in the office, clearly anybody else can. Right?
Right?
Like I said, we worked above a supermarket. You could go down and get whatever you want and be back before your emails had refreshed. And the smell of eggs made me hungry in a way that I couldn't quite explain. I must have been hungover.
Anyway, you can tell by the title of this post what I did: I went down and bought some hamburger buns, some spinach, some cheese slices and, of course, some hamburgers. They only had the crappy frozen ones. My goodness, how crap are they! They must be 90% fat. And yet they are strangely delicious.
Lunchtime rolled around and I got cooking. I marvelled at how hot this cheap little sandwich press got. The hamburgers sizzled. The smell was amazing. It filled the kitchen with cooking fat. There was so much fat it pooled over the sides and made a mess on the counter. I had to use half a roll of paper towel just to wipe up the mess. I toasted my buns (why not?) and then a bit of butter, some sauce, spread the spinach out and made sure it was dry.
The hamburger went on the bun and I used an ungodly amount of paper towels to soak up the excess fat on the sandwich press. There was so much of it I was worried it would start a fire.
I wolfed down that burger like a man stranded on a desert island for six months. It was amazing. The best burger I had eaten in a year. I couldn't believe just how good it tasted. It was heavenly.
After that, I went for a walk. There's a bike path running along a creek. The creek is quite pleasant but it is often covered in rubbish and the grass around the path can be overgrown. But it didn't matter. The sun was out and there was a slight breeze. I walked off my burger and headed back to the office.
That's when it hit me: the smell.
Oh my God, what have I done? The smell was everywhere, covered everything. The printer smelled of hamburgers. My keyboard smelled of hamburgers. My coworkers smelled of hamburgers. And not in a good way. Not in a "I am hungry and must eat" way, but in a "who the fuck cooked hamburgers in the office kitchen?" kind of way.
Oops.
And yet nobody complained. Nobody stabbed me. Nobody sent out a memo about appropriate use of office kitchen equipment. Nothing. The only thing that happened was we got a second sandwich press.
And this one was marked 'vegetarian'.