Do you walk to work or bring your lunch?

The big excitement at work this week is the addition of a toaster oven.

It frightens me to think that IT people might try their hand at creative culinary delights. Gradually, the refrigerator has begun to fill up with exotic ingredients and I can see a day in the very near future when one of my co-workers gets the idea that baked salmon would be a swell idea for lunch. Because you know -- it's not enough to smell up the place with a microwaved shrimp dish.

Today was the beginning of the calamity. A few of us had made a friendly wager based on the first time someone flamed up a tasty treat in this not-suitable-for-the-office appliance. I bet on today, the first Friday of the oven's sure-to-be short-lived existence. My rationale was simple: Fridays are special and people bring food and make special things. Undoubtedly, any given nimrod could get all excited about toasting or baking something. Between being unfamiliar with the apparatus and sheer dumbassedness, I figured Friday was the day we would experience a craptacular inferno never before seen in our lovely workplace. Other theories relied on an accumulation over time of various crumbs, drippings, and coagulations. Valid, but mine was the most viable given human nature.

I nearly won the wager today. One of my buddies came running into my cube and whispered excitedly, "someone's making a waffle in the toaster oven....and it's sitting on a paper plate!"

Word spread faster than the impending flames and five or six of us went running like schoolgirls to the break room to watch the conflagration ensue. It never occurred to a one of us that we should immediately yank the scorching paper plate out of the oven. We were too excited to see if my brilliant theory would be the winner.

The fun ended when the hapless soul responsible for the moronic act arrived just in time and removed the golden brown waffle and browned paper plate. She removed it from the oven without a comment as if what she had done was completely normal and correct.

We must have laughed about that for a good 20 minutes.