Photo: Creative commons pixabay
Do you make your lunch or do you buy it?
And if you buy it, do you ask for a takeaway fork?
Missing office cutlery is a worldwide phenomenon. A bit like socks when only one comes out of the dryer.
First Up found out how some employers have been 'forked' to take matters into their own hands.
Lylo is an Auckland youth hostel and bar.
Mystery of missing office supplied cutlery - where does it go?
But the owner of the bar said something was missing.
"It's always forks. I think they must end up in people's suitcases or something."
And it was not anything unique to New Zealand if an Irish tourist walking down Auckland's Hobson Street was anything to go by.
"Forks is always a major shortage. Yeah, knife speeds are fine, but there's never any forks.
"I think people throw them in the bin and yeah, they just don't get returned to the dishwasher."
Employees around the world were being forced to come up with creative ways to compensate for a lack of missing office cutlery and RNZ's own Auckland office was not immune.
Facilities co-ordinator Pratik Navani had his own theory.
"I feel like there is a kleptomaniac crisis."
Dr Mark Mattiussi is the chief medical officer and director of medical services at Australia's Royal Brisbane Hospital.
In December 2020, he led a team of researchers looking into the circulation lifespan of forks and teaspoons in the intensive care staff tearoom.
And for Mattiussi it all started with a simple wish ... to keep his workers happy.
"When I first took over as the service line director of that particular team, what I found was that they were using those timber paddle pop stirrers for every single piece of cutlery, so they had no knives, they had no forks, they had no spoons.
"Some were even trying to use them as chopsticks in order to eat spaghetti because they had no fork."
Mattiussi and his team set about getting ethics approval for a scientific study into finding where the cutlery was going.
"So this team came to me and said, 'Well, Mark, you know, this is clearly a problem. I said, 'It is'."
"I know normally that team studies, trauma burns, antimicrobial resistance or superbug resistance in intensive care units. And I said to them, 'Put a research study around this'."
The team bought 18 teaspoons and forks, discreetly marked them with red nail polish and added them to the cutlery drawer.
Over the next seven weeks, they would do a fortnightly count of the marked pieces.
Mattiussi said the forks disappeared and then reappeared.
"We have hypothesised that even though this was a Christmas edition research article, perhaps it would have been better published in April around Easter, where the concept of the resurrection is something that's a well recognised phenomenon."
But the team had no idea what was happening to the teaspoons although they did consider some form of GPS tracking.
"It's hard to to ascertain why the teaspoons disappear and not come back."
"One of the findings from our study was that perhaps we had greater access to resources and technology that perhaps we could put radio frequency identification tags on the spoons and had location grade Wi-Fi within the health service and we might find out whether the teaspoons were being moved around the hospital or perhaps being thrown in the bin and taken out of the hospital, or perhaps even being taken by staff."
One of my research team said 'Mark of course, it's obvious we just need to study the crockery and determine whether the plates are disappearing as well, because that would be the hey diddle diddle phenomenon where the dish ran away with the spoon."
Mattiussi said he did not believe people were stealing them.
"We do undertake criminal history checks for all people working in the healthcare environment so we're not employing criminals to start off."
Back at RNZ, Navani had been 'forked' to take matters into his own hands.
"Last year, I ordered 240 pieces of cutlery and they all ran out within like eight or nine months and we were back to complaints of there not being enough cutlery. So two weeks ago I ordered around 240 more and I'm hoping that that lasts another year, but probably not."
Meanwhile, Mattiussi had some parting words.
"A number of the journalists from Hong Kong have in fact reported that chopsticks have also suffered from the same problem as our normal metal cutlery. So it certainly traverses not only Australia and New Zealand, but the entire world and many, many different cultures."