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Donating forks to the dining hall

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Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#2

Post by ggm »

My partner and I donated cutlery to our Apt complex multipurpose media room. It's where people who live there can watch movies on a projector or have meetings or birthdays.

We bought over 50 teaspoons. I think we're down to 5. We got 10-15 each of knives forks and spoons and they were predated, but not as much.

The body corporate tut-tutted and said they wouldn't do it, I think it's ok to accept some people just wind up pilfering these things, and you deal with it. If you need flatware that badly, I don't mind.

Its 4-5 years in, we probably need to recommit. I don't know I'd go to the bother of etching or stamping anything.

My sister and I fought over who got the NAAFI (british army PX) fork with a hole in the handle. The hole was for a chain, which clearly somebody broke, to steal the fork, which wound up in our cutlery drawer at home in the 50s/60s.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#3

Post by jhbadger »

Reminds of of the replacement of "threeks" at the UW-Madison campus in the 1980s. At the time, it was common for satirical parties to win student elections and do odd things like cover the campus with plastic flamingos. One of the satirical parties was upset that the UW-Madison cafeteria didn't have true forks (with four tines) but only "threeks" (forks with three tines). So they decided to work with friends at Northwestern university outside Chicago to trade their cafeteria's forks for UW's threeks. They were successful, but obviously both UW's and Northwestern's administration weren't pleased and the trade was reversed.

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#7

Post by gravescale »

ggm wrote: post #2

My partner and I donated cutlery to our Apt complex multipurpose media room. It's where people who live there can watch movies on a projector or have meetings or birthdays. We bought over 50 teaspoons. I think we're down to 5. We got 10-15 each of knives forks and spoons and they were predated, but not as much. The body corporate tut-tutted and said they wouldn't do it, I think it's ok to accept some people just wind…

If you care (which it sounds like, quite reasonably to me, you don't really), use pliers to bend over just the very end of the handle or put 180 twist in the handle. Very obvious and maybe unappealing to the sticky-fingered, without too much degradation to the immediate function of the object. And for teaspoons bought by the score, which i assume are stamped metal, the handle is probably thin enough to make it easy.

Though at attrition rates of under 10 per year, it could also be partly careless disposal leading to spoons in the bin rather than only deliberate pocketings of 30p teaspoons!

Re: Donating forks to the dining hall

#10

Post by hn_user82179 »

santoshalper wrote: post #5

I found this utterly charming. It reminded me how much I like tech people before Silicon Valley gets ahold of them and turns them into egomaniacs.

This was a very charming post! I clicked through and found myself reading another 8 blog posts from this person, and I concluded that this is the kind of person I think I'd like and like to work with. They appear to be an intern currently and probably will be looking for full-time work soon. (open hint to anyone looking to hire, this seems like a person I'd personally want to work with but alas am not in a hiring manager/recruiter position).

And, for what it's worth, I personally think Silicon Valley just gives a microphone to egomaniacs, which is different from turning charming tech people into egomaniacs. Zuck didn't need fame/money to produce Hot or Not. The quirky people I knew in college doing cool things are still doing quirky, cool things.

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