Office microwaves

Dear Aunt Slugger:

I work in a small office where there is a communal microwave. On occasion, my coworkers like to reheat fish in this microwave, and it smells like a rotting orca corpse on a hot summer's day. What should I do?

Signed,
If I Wanted to Work in a Seaworld Graveyard I Would At Least Be Living Someplace Sunny

Dear IIWTWIASGIWALBLSS:

This question comes to us from Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of the world's most prestigious universities, top-notch scientific research firms, and an unsurpassed number of self-centered motherfuckers. What surprises me more than the fact that anyone would deem it appropriate to reheat fish in a communal microwave is the fact that IIWTWIASGIWALBLSS seems genuinely shocked by this behavior.

Cambridge is the same town where bicyclists regularly speed the wrong way down narrow one-way streets and then demand the Congressional Medal of Honor after transit buses accidentally plow them down like common roadkill. So we should not be surprised when a Cambridge resident throws some haddock with onion-n-garlic sauce on a paper towel, sets the microwave on high for eight minutes, and then walks away to post an angry blog entry complaining about how an ambulance sped through a green light and almost ran him over while he was running a red light on his bicycle in a pedestrian crosswalk.

But I digress. This is a particularly difficult situation because people who microwave fish are several levels removed from other, lesser offenders, like people who leave their egg salad sandwiches in the fridge for two weeks. Your basic egg salad offender will eventually respond to subtle comments like, "Is there a dead body in this fridge?" People who microwave fish, on the other hand, will never, ever take the hint.

You could try retaliating in kind by putting something equally horrific in the microwave, like a forty-pound bag of rancid clams marinating in venison broth, but this could only serve to encourage the offender, and before you know it, he or she will be preparing raw catfish on the office fax machine.

The real solution, IIWTWIASGIWALBLSS, is to change the offender's fundamental attitude toward microwaving fish. I'm not talking about sitting him down and politely telling him that he almost put two people in a coma the last time he had leftover swordfish; that will never work. The key is to get him to believe that he doesn't really want to microwave fish.

Fortunately, since you are located in Cambridge, this should be relatively easy. The average Cantabridgian (so called because "resident of Cambridge" is not considered pretentious enough) is extremely impressionable when it comes to health and health food. Work that angle. The next time you see the offender heading for the microwave, you should casually say, "I'm surprised you're microwaving that; I thought raw [whatever it is--salmon, crab legs, shark] was better for you because it has more [pick a scientific word--antioxidants, Omega-3s, botulism] than when you microwave it." NOTE: This won't work if the fish is part of one of those frozen meals that you see at the grocery store. In this case, you would be advised to just suck it up and take the destruction of property charge after you take a baseball bat to the microwave.

Sincerely,
Aunt Slugger