In almost every refrigerator in every home, there is a package of old, mysterious food. It could be furry, smelly or have actually developed into a new life form by the time you find it and dispose of it. There is one place that contains food more frightening that the home refrigerator: the office refrigerator.

To say that this appliance is the black hole of food is inaccurate only in the fact that some of the food eventually resurfaces.

There are a variety of standard food items in office refrigerators. Most of them contain some form of creamer, often the non-dairy varieties, as well as variously dated cartons of milk. There are always a few jars with condiments like mustard, mayonnaise and jam. The number of condiments is directly proportional to the number of people who work in the office and have access to the fridge, so despite the fact that no one can recall ever adding anything themselves, a fridge in an office of 50 people will have a dozen bottles of salad dressing, a few jars of mayonnaise and at least 3 different mustards, in addition to pickles, soy sauce and ketchup - none of which anyone can find when they want to use it, of course, which leads to the addition of even more condiments.

The best office refrigerators are the ones that are entirely filled with condiments, since that prevents other and more disturbing food stuffs from ending up inside, like the leftover garlic and tuna pasta salad that your boss's secretary put – uncovered – into the fridge behind the ketchup bottles where neither she nor anyone else could immediate see it. The phrase "out of sight out of mind" applies to leftovers and by the time the dish is finally discovered and identified as the source of the unpleasant odor permeating the fridge, it seems to be intelligent enough to plan its own escape.

Ok. That might be a bit melodramatic. Surely someone would have found that pasta before it really went bad, despite the fact that people turn a blind eye to the condition of the fridge for fear of being the one to clean it out.

It is no exaggeration that there can be some foul things in the fridge, especially when it gets treated as a filing cabinet for perishables rather than as a place for food you actually want to eat. I am sure that everyone has at least one story of finding strange foodstuffs in the fridge, whether it was a furry pasta salad or a jar of maraschino cherries that kept reappearing no matter how many times it was thrown away. My only question is whether anyone can top my weird fridge story:

I once worked in a building where two offices, each occupied by separate businesses, shared a break room. Naturally, there was a large refrigerator in it. Two different staffs using the same fridge led to an unusually fast buildup of condiments and a coworker – let's call her Jane – and I took it upon ourselves to remove some of the older ones from the fridge to open up space for fresh ones.

The day after the cleanup, Jane tucked her brown lunch bag into the newly spacious fridge and set to her work. Around lunch time, I followed her into the break room when she went to retrieve her food. She opened the refrigerator door and began to scream. I looked over her shoulder and saw that there was a large, dead crow on a shelf in the fridge, neatly tucked up against her lunch bag.

Apparently, one of the employees of the other office, a college student who later informed us she was a wiccan (as though that explained the situation), had seen a dead crow in the road on her way to work, wanted to take it home with her and put it in the fridge for safekeeping during the day. Attracted to the break room by the screaming, the girl was shocked that her bird was the thing causing it. Jane told her, in surprisingly calm tone, that she couldn't keep the crow the fridge and - before we could react - she put it into the freezer.

In the end, the girl took her bird home to stuff it/eat it/worship it and Jane attempted to disinfect both the fridge and freezer with various chemical cleansers and a gallon or two of bleach. Sterilized or not, no one ever put anything into the fridge again because it was just a little difficult to get past the fact that a roadkill crow had been placed in amongst jars of peanut butter and next to someone's lunch.

(Mmm... roadkill...)

I think that this supports my theory of using condiments to keep out other unwanted things out of the fridge. After all, would you rather see more salad dressing or more crow?

And if you pick the latter, at least have the decency to put it in Tupperware or something.