too long didn’t read.

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last week, david asked me to recount the great passive aggressive work fridge post-it 80s hair band lunch meme war of 2013 and, realizing it’s been over a year since this all went down, i figured now was as good time as any to share with you guys too. so, here it goes:

in august 2013 i started buying a week’s worth of coffee / breakfast / lunch / afternoon snacks from trader joe’s on monday mornings and storing everything in the communal work fridge for affordable healthy lunch optimizing purposes throughout the week (something i used to do when i was a paralegal making $0K a year, living in a hell’s kitchen shoebox diorama, and just, like, trying to do me without incurring crippling credit card debt). this time around, i was conscious people might be put off by someone storing more than a day’s worth of food in a communal work fridge and was also worried lesser than folks might steal some of it (peer on peer crime runs rampant at my office) so i wrote “this belongs to amy marsh. trying to save $$$. midtown lunch is a battlefield. xo, amy” in strong black sharpie on the front of my bag. when i went to get my lunch later that day, i noticed someone had slapped a post-it on my bag that said:

so is the real
estate in this
fridge.
just sayin’

basically, i took the whole thing VERY PERSONALLY (first mistake), got REALLY EMBARRASSED (second mistake), and then got SUPER PISSED (third and final mistake). i felt like this post-it jerk was hiding in plain sight since i had written my full name on the bag and there was no reason he / she couldn’t hit me up in person. after i calmed down, i moved my bag to a less crowded fridge, left the jerky post-it at the scene of the crime, and scribbled the following reply on top:

no name? so lame!
would have been happy
to work something out …
amy.marsh@jwt.com
x7684

when i went back to the war zone fridge later that day, i saw someone had added a “sponsored by passive aggressive notes” post-it into the mix and, within an hour or so, the whole thing started to snowball as people found they could easily riff on “midtown lunch is a battlefield” by designing these totally awesome 80s hair band lunch memes and taping them to the front of the fridge (think “lunch is a battlefield” by pat benatar, “take my lunch away” by berlin, etc.). new memes went up daily for almost 3 months until [sadly] maintenance had to power wash all the fridges in preparation for thanksgiving and everyone forgot about everything.

TLDR THE STRUGGLE IS REAL.

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