Ode to a fork...

Forks are a very important invention when one is trying to obey the social norms of a civilised society. I expect that if I lived the life of a hermit I would find that, will forks are useful, they are not of critical importance. However, as I do not live the life of a hermit (most days) this is a rather irrelevant observation.

Today, I lost my fork. I'm sure I put a fork in my bag with my lunch, but when I got my lunch out of my bag the fork was no where to be seen. While this would be an intriguing mystery it would not have presented a problem if I had been eating a sandwich for lunch, but as it was pasta in a rather messy tomato sauce that was on the menu it was a slight issue.

Being forkless, I had to try to find a fork or a similarly efficient means of conveying food to my mouth, such as a spoon. I went downstairs to the staff tea room to heat my pasta in the microwave and hunt out a fork. The staff room is a very interesting place in the school of zoology. As the zoology building is built against the incline of a rather steep hill, some parts of the building have more floors than other parts. In fact, level 4 (the second highest level in the building) actually becomes ground level at the highest point of the hill. Technically, the floor where the tea room is located is level 1, but there is a second level 1 on the other side of the building and they don't meet up, and half of level 1 is actually underground. Even though the only truly important thing on level 1 is the tea room, it is technically the main entrance to the building. Most undergrads, however, live in complete ignorance that level 1 even exists, which, I think, is exactly the way the staff like it.

Approximately 95% percent of the time, the tea room exists in a lonely state of complete unoccupation. However, between the hours of 11:00am and 11:20am Monday-Friday it becomes a hive of activity crowded with recently re-caffeinated academics. On Wednesdays, affectionately termed "cake-days" by said academics, the room is packed to overflowing as everyone crowds around to get their slice of cake. If you want to take a popular piece of equipment or vehicle out into the field to do research, the best time to do it is a Wednesday morning as no-one else will be using it. They will all be at "cake-day".

Enough about the tearoom, back to the hunt for the fork. The first place I looked was in the cutlery drawer, which I deemed to be a sensible place for the storage of surplus forks. However, the cutlery drawer contained neither forks nor spoons, but merely a motley arrangement of knives. I surmise that this intriguing observation might arise from the propensity for staff here in the school of zoology to "borrow" a fork or a spoon with which to eat the lunch that they have heated up in the microwave, go up to their office so they can eat their lunch while watching clips on you-tube, and never return the fork or spoon to the tearoom because that would require walking back through the rabbit-warren of corridors and traversing at least one, but in most cases two or three, flights of stairs. Knives, on the other hand, are rarely needed and, therefore, do not get stolen (sorry, "borrowed") on a very regular basis.

After some more hunting, I eventually found a fork standing in a coffee mug and was able to eat my lunch while obeying the social rules of civilized society.

But I still don't know what happened to my fork.