Anonymously Famous

There is a gentleman who whenever he visits our site, he brings a box of cinnamon doughnuts and a box of cheese and bacon buns. It’s very exciting. If I have an important job out here, that job would be the email I send out to different departments letting them know the the doughnut man has arrived and he has bought with him glourious food stuffs. I once sent the email out, and it seemed as if some of the people I sent the email to actually beat the email. It would have not been even 30 seconds since I pressed the send button, and the people on the doughnut mailing list started coming into the processing wing.

Ah, yes. I acutally have a mailing list set up to tell people that there are doughnuts and buns for them to eat. I used to walk around, but after a while it became obvious who would want free food and who didn’t, so I created the mailing list “Doughnut people.” I like to think that these people are sitting at their desks, having a boring day, and then up pops the notification that there are Free!! Dougnuts!! And Scrolls!! And that makes them happy.

One of the great things about the doughnut man, is we’re never really sure as to when he is going to appear. Well, I say we, but I am sure that the supervisors and managers know when he is due. The ‘lay’ people do not, so whenever he turns up everyone gets slightly a little bit excited. And there is great joy throughout the building.

People are always grateful to be told that there is free food, and they like to tell me how much they appreciate me telling them. As I always say back to them, I’m doing myself more of a favour than them; the doughtnuts and whatnot are in my line of vision, so the sooner I can get rid of them, the less likely I am to cave and scoff down the lot of them. So really, anyone who’s not me that eats them, are doing me a huge favour. So really, it’s the Circle of Life… but with more food and less witch-doctor gibbons. It also comes in handy if I need a different department to do something for me, they remember that I am a nice person who lets them know first that there’s delicious and free food on the premises.

I’ve always said that if you want to poison people out here, all you need to do is bring out a box of food, and it will get eaten within minutes. We came in one morning at 7 am and there was a box of doughnuts sitting on a filing cabinet and people devoured the box like a lion on a gazelle during a 15 month drought. The weird thing about these particular doughnuts, is that it was not the usual time for the doughnut man to drop them off, nor was it the usual spot he dropped them off. No one knew who they belonged to, and no one cared. As long as the food was free they were happy to eat. I should also point out that our site is 40 minutes out of town, and while we have vending machines with soft drinks, potato chips and chocolates in them, unless you bring food, there’s no other food readily avaible. Most people keep ‘spare’ food in their desks for those rare but devastating occassions when you forget your lunch on the kitchen table.