Pandora and the Ark

Being a dishwasher I see a lot of, you guessed it, dishes! They range from the obvious plates, glasses and silverware to pots, plastic containers, pans, frying pans, sheet pans, half pans, full pans, drain pans... there's a lot of pans.

What's great about a lot of those dishes is that every kind generally matches well with their own kind. Y'know what I mean? The plastic containers fit into other plastic containers, frying pans are the same size; they match. That's good. Because there's definitely a certain amount of space to put everything and it can only get more crowded. The last thing anybody needs is to have a bunch of malformed dishes screwing up the necessity of stacking.

Well, unfortunately we've got about a hundred of 'em in the form of plates. How they came into the hotels possession is almost mythical. We're pretty sure they came from Richland by mistake but we haven't been able to give them back. All we know is they're there and we can't get rid of them.

Now, they're not that much different from the plates that are actually ours. They're maybe a couple centimeters smaller and are a bit deeper. The dining room staff as well as banquets are barely able to tell the difference. Put one of them in a tall stack of regular plates and then you've got a problem.

What should be a stable ceramic tower is now liable to topple should anyone glance askance at it.
So naturally these plates are a problem when we run out of regular plates and need to use them. What's funny (in a cosmic sort of way, which means not funny at all) is the cart they're in is broken and has a big hand written note saying they shouldn't be used at all. It never works, and few weeks ago enough was enough.

I went to Brandon and told him that sorting them back into their own stacks was getting out of hand. Dining room and banquets either refused to, or didn't know they had to, stack them separately so as to avoid plate smashing catastrophe. I offered to put them in their broken cart and roll them down the hill and hope for the best. Y'know, natural selection and all that.

He agreed that they were a problem (he didn't agree on my proposal), and suggested we box them up and hide them somewhere.

Fine by me.

Brandon picked out a couple boxes to put them and gave them to me for reinforcement and placement. Using some really high quality duct tape I secured the bottom of the boxes so nothing could fall out. For the first box I shoved more than half of the plates into it. I guess I thought I could fit all of them in there but once it was full I still had about 25 or 30 plates left. I taped up the top and asked Brandon if I could borrow his sharpie.

Now I couldn't just write 'DON'T USE' on the box because look at how effective that was for the cart. As I am wont to be, I got a little creative.

Ark of the Covenant
Do not open ever!
You have been warned!

I showed it to Brandon and it got a pretty big laugh so I knew I'd done my job. I took the Ark back into banquets and stuffed it away in a nice little hidey spot. As I walked back the line, "It's being examined by top men." kept replaying in my head.

I still had the other box though. I put the rest of the plates in it and taped up the top like I did with the other box. I just didn't know what to put on the top of it. The answer came to me pretty quick and I scrawled away.

Pandora's Box
Don't open this one either!

I put it back with the Ark and was quite happy with myself. The idiot plates were out of the way and would only be seen if there was a really big event. And it'd surely be a long time until that happened.

Well it didn't take long. The other day Brandon came up to me and told me they had to open one of the boxes.

"Crap. Well wait, which one did they open?" I asked.
"Oh, don't worry, they only opened Pandora's. The Ark is still sealed." Brandon answered.
"Good, if the Ark had been opened that would have sucked."
"You don't have to tell me."

As Brandon walked away I thought for a second about what had just happened. I wasn't expecting that when I named the boxes that it would stick. It felt kinda cool to have created a kind of in-joke at work. A code if you will.

I'm pretty sure that not many people know they're back there because Brandon told me he went and got them himself when he was told more plates were needed for the banquet that night. So hopefully the secret is still safe.

I'd hate to get fired if somebody's face gets melted off because they needed a few more plates.