The Noodle

The long rotini noodle is still sitting outside the elevators on the eighth floor of my office building.

It has been there since Tuesday.

It is about half a foot long, wheat, cooked, sauceless. It first appeared in the corner next to the door to the inter-building walkway. It has inched its way to a central location between the first and second elevators.

I am obsessed with this noodle, and not only because of its preposterous size (where do you buy a rotini noodle that long?).

I am obsessed with the fascination of watching the easy hypocrisy of my workplace. I work at an enormous international development nonprofit. We espouse civic morals all day long. We want businessmen in Moldova to take action against corruption, fisherman in Sri Lanka to work towards civic peace, and kids in Jordan to get involved in NGOs. Hell, I oversee a program in Darfur where we try to get kids to pick up trash!

Yet, no one at my organization, for 4 days, has removed this noodle from the floor.

I haven’t either: I am too interested in the sociological experiment. When will the noodle go? Will I get to watch it progress from a clean, cooked, firm brown noodle to a decaying squish? Will the perpetrator admit that he littered a lunch noodle and pick it up surreptitiously, when no one sees him? Will one of the many employees of my organization who love to slather their self-righteousness onto the rest of us try to create a stink about the noodle over email, preaching about cleanliness and indecency and who knows what else? Will the cause then get picked up by the unctuous senior VPs of my organization, whose capacity for slathering self-righteousness in peculiarly nasty syntax knows no bounds? Or will one of the janitors, noticing the noodle now that it has moved to a more prominent location, simply sweep the offending pasta into the trash?

Someone with statistical training should research whether community values break down more in settings in which those values are professionally espoused. I have never seen a place in which fewer people refused to do their dishes in the kitchen, more people stole other people’s food from the communal refrigerator, or more people in general refused to take any responsibility for shared space as in my current non-profit, which promotes civic participation, action, and responsibility.

I also would like to point out that, in said nonprofit, my bicycle yesterday was thrown to the ground in the secure bike cage, resulting in a broken left brake handle and stretched right brake cable. I have sent a company-wide email asking for the bike-thrower to help pay for fixing my brakes. I am waiting to see if the guilty person has any moral fiber; my bet is no.