Picture this: you’ve just survived a marathon of a day, battling through long lectures, soul crushing assignments and the exhaustion of simply existing. You’re so excited to get back to your room, sink into your bed and watch your favourite show while eating the cake you bought yesterday that you carefully stashed in the common room fridge so it wouldn’t go bad in the Krea heat. You open the heavily abused fridge door with the intense craving of the sweet treat, only to find an empty space or even worse, just the box of the cake without the cake actually in it, mocking your very existence.
Storing food in the common room fridge is nothing less than an extreme sport, it’s basically the Hunger Games with worse fluorescent lighting and no prize money. We love to brag about being a highly evolved and civilized species but put us in front of the common fridge and we go back to being lawless scavengers battling it out over leftover food.Â
Have you ever been victimised by the “solidarity leftover”? This is a uniquely devious form of psychological warfare. Someone chugs all of your juice but leaves exactly one microscopic sip at the bottom of the carton. Why? So they don’t have to carry the guilt of actually finishing it nor the physical burden of walking five steps to the trash can to throw the bottle away. It gives off major “I didn’t finish the whole thing so stop complaining” energy which is honestly ten times worse than if they just finished everything and destroyed the evidence by throwing the carton away.
You need to be so skilled to pull off being a fridge thief and there are so many different types of them. First comes the borrower: They operate on the delusion of future repayment. “I’ll just take one slice of pizza and buy them a new one tomorrow” Spoiler alert, the tomorrow they speak of doesn’t exist in our timeline.Â
Then we have the Expiration calculator. They justify their crimes through terrible math and fake concerns “This buldak has been sitting in the fridge for two full days. If I don’t eat it, it’ll go bad, so I’m basically doing them a public service.” They view themselves as unspoken heroes of waste management.
Finally we have the Karma accountant who operates on a highly personalized system of cosmic balance. “ Someone stole my brownie last week so the universe, through this specific fridge, owes me this exact blueberry cheesecake. It’s just the circle of life.”
Naturally, this casual theft leads to taking precautionary measures to protect food. The moment you realize your food has vanished, you go through the five stages of grief. First comes denial “Maybe I put it on the bottom shelf?” Then frustration which shows up on the dorm group chats through snide texts and when no one replies you start viewing everyone in your RH as a potential snack thief, which then escalates to physical security. We start with passive aggressive sticky notes heavily underlined in red pen channeling Ross Geller’s “MY SANDWICH!” energy from Friends to full blown paranoid security measures. People are out here keeping lockboxes in the back of the fridge just to protect some Dal Makhani and naan. The shared fridge is the ultimate social experiment. It reminds us that no matter how educated or civilized we think we are, humanity is always just one missing midnight snack away from pure chaos.
So to whoever is currently digesting a carefully labelled leftover I genuinely hope it satisfies your craving but just know that karma works way faster than RH wifi.