The Refrigerator of Fantastic Stories

My cubicle at Ye’ Ol’ Day Job is next to a small office kitchen. Normally this isn’t a bad thing. There’s some “oh-man-I-need-coffee” foot-traffic around 9 am and then the lunch bunch a couple hours later. I’m a social creature by nature, so I don’t mind the activity.

Lately, however, the refrigerator has been brewing a special scent of awesome that would waft into my space every time someone opened the door. The musky aroma has been getting worse day the day, making it almost impossible to ignore. This morning, a co-worker and I finally had enough and waded into the appliance like Marines storming a beach.

It wasn’t pretty.

There were numerous condiments well past their expiration date*, but the winner for Most Grotesque Item and the How the Heck Do You NOT Smell That? Award was the package of lunch meat with an expiration date of this past March.

March, people. MARCH!

Condiments I can understand. CobraMrsFit and I regularly force ourselves to eat salads to ensure we use up the dressing before it goes bad. Same thing with ketchup (on burgers, not salads). But lunchmeat? By all things holy, there are no words that can describe the horror of that discovery.

Several dry-heaves later, the fridge was clean(er) and we were back at our desks.

But this morning’s episode got me thinking about the Refrigerator of Fantastic Stories. I have WIPs sitting in there that haven’t been touched in years and I’m pretty sure they have grown stale and moldy. Granted, not all of them are gems waiting to be discovered, but it’s good to at least look at them once in a while. You know, brush the fuzz off the plot and maybe freshen things up a bit. With a little effort, it might even be polished into something crisp and juicy.

Or, if it turns out to be a real stinker, I can always shove it behind the mayo and pretend it doesn’t exist for another few months.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some more dry-heaving to attend to.  

*And by “well past”, I mean over a year.