The Purge: An After-Action Report

They came at 5:04 with two bins and gloves. It took eleven minutes.

Removed: nine of the eleven condiment bottles, all four mustards among them; the labeled lunch bag; the three yogurts; and the Tupperware, which was lifted out, held at arm's length for a moment by a man named Errol who has worked in this building for six years, and placed in the bin without being opened. Errol has my complete respect.

Two condiment bottles survived on the grounds that they were labeled with a current employee's name and an in-date expiry, which is the actual rule and which four people are now aware of for the first time.

The rule has been printed on a laminated card taped inside the door since at least 2023. I have walked past it approximately nine hundred times. Nobody on this floor could have told you what it said, and I include myself, and I write a newspaper about this floor.

What I had not expected was the mood. There was an audience — six people who had no reason to be in the kitchen at five past five on a Friday and who were in the kitchen at five past five on a Friday. Nobody spoke much. Somebody said “oh, that's what that was” about a container near the back, and nobody followed up, and I have decided not to pursue it.

The shelf is white. I had not seen the shelf. Nobody currently on this floor had seen the shelf. It turns out to be quite a bright white, and the whole compartment is noticeably better lit than it was on Thursday, which several people commented on independently as though a bulb had been changed. No bulb was changed.

A woman who joined in July, and who therefore never met her, asked whose the yogurts had been.

Three people answered at once, with her full name, and then nobody said anything for a moment.

It is a strange thing to discover that a refrigerator was doing memorial work.

Nine weeks of a small unspoken arrangement, ended correctly and unsentimentally by Facilities at 5:04 on a Friday, which is genuinely the right way for it to have ended and I am still a bit sad about it. Errol did not know. There is no version of this where somebody tells Errol.

The woman who asked is called Nadia and she apologized afterward, to me, in the corridor, for having asked — which is the detail I keep turning over. She had walked into a small piece of collective grief she could not have known was there and her instinct was that she had done something wrong.

She had not. She asked the only honest question available in that kitchen and got three simultaneous answers from people who had been waiting nine weeks to say the name out loud to somebody who would ask.

The status change was logged at 11:42 on Thursday with no comment attached. No engineer has visited. No kettle has arrived.

Three home kettles remain in service. The floor has, in effect, privatized hot water and it is working better than the public option ever did.

She said, and I quote in full: “Hey — could you do calls on headphones? I can hear both sides from over here.”

He said “oh God, sorry, yeah,” looked genuinely mortified, and has worn headphones every day since.

Fourteen months. Eleven people complaining to each other. Nine seconds of someone being direct and slightly awkward. I would like everyone reading this to sit with that.