Who Fucking Stole My Pop?

Yeah, most everybody has to deal with the perils of a communal workplace refrigerator, and I'm sure everybody has had their food and/or drink stolen at least once.  It had not happened yet in my current position, though, and I felt like I was entitled to a sense of security.  UNTIL YESTERDAY.

I had two bottles of pop in there, one Pepsi, one Coke.  Per policy, I wrote my name on there, and even though one doesn't have to, I put the date on there too because I did that on other jobs and other workers at my company date their stuff.  I thought that would be good enough for someone not to fuck with my stuff.  I checked Tuesday; even though one bottle was left there for a few days and the other upwards of a week, they both were there, albeit pushed all the way to the back.

Fast-forward to yesterday/Wednesday.  For the first time in a long time I got chili because Father gave me breadsticks he got from my parents' cruise.  And you have to have a Coke with chili, right?  I hadn't touched either pop in that fridge in a few days, but I assumed that they'd be safe because, hey, no one at work would be a thieving dick, right?

Grrrr ... I look in there and I don't see either bottle.  I know which shelf it was; it was the tall one, in the middle, the only one where both bottles that tall could stand.  I remember, explicitly, seeing them at the back of that shelf.  And now they weren't there.  I tried looking all around it.  Maybe someone moved it to another shelf, or to one of the shelves connected to the door.  I will admit that I haven't done a thorough search of the fridge.  It's hard to do when there's a damn bundt cake right in front of everything.  But I feel safe to declare that they're gone.

Again, just leaving stuff in a fridge that's shared by everyone is fraught with disaster, and yet I still feel pretty fucking violated.  I followed the rules: If I wrote my name on it, it wouldn't be taken or thrown away.  So where the fuck is it?  And why the fuck did some prick steal it?  Either it's because someone wanted to drink my half-empty bottle of pop, in which case, ew, or some overbearing nun of a co-worker saw the dates on my bottles, determined they were too old to stay in the fridge, and took it upon her- or himself to toss them.  That line of thinking, if true, pisses me off.  A bottle of half-drank Coke does not stink up a fridge, and even if it does, that does not give some cog in a company the right to throw away my stuff.

Obviously I can't do anything about it.  Well, I did do something anyway.  I embarrassed the shit out of myself by asking the cleaning lady before I left for the day if she throws shit in the fridge away.  Like I thought, she said that she does not touch anything inside that appliance.  Of course she doesn't; that's not her job, and in fact she would get in trouble if she even opened the door.  Why in the fuck would I ask that stupid goddamn question besides to make an ass out of myself, humiliate her, and permanently rupture any superficial comity we had with each other when we crossed paths?

I can't just go around asking/accusing people of stealing my Coke.  And, ultimately, it was one-third of Pepsi and two-thirds of Coke left to drink, so that's basically a full bottle ... uh, so I'm the equivalent of a full bottle, or two bucks.  And yet I have to admit that this grinds my gears.  Stuff was taken from me in the fridge by some asshole I work with, again.  Un-fucking-believable.