Reminds of of the replacement of "threeks" at the UW-Madison campus in the 1980s. At the time, it was common for satirical parties to win student elections and do odd things like cover the campus with plastic flamingos. One of the satirical parties was upset that the UW-Madison cafeteria didn't have true forks (with four tines) but only "threeks" (forks with three tines). So they decided to work with friends at Northwestern university outside Chicago to trade their cafeteria's forks for UW's threeks. They were successful, but obviously both UW's and Northwestern's administration weren't pleased and the trade was reversed.
There's a common pattern in population dynamics that I've observed, which probably has a formal name: A given system with (to simplify) two types of behavior: good and bad will tolerate and self correct up to certain percentage of bad actors (call this the jerk threshold, JT) after which <i>all</i> participants switch to the bad behavior. Examples are line formation for a service, cutting people off in traffic, stealing from common areas, hoarding office supplies, etc.<p>Anecdata: When I travel back to the country I've grown up I resort back to being a jerk in traffic and cutting in lines because you <i>have to</i>.<p>I've always wondered what the JT for different situations is, before the system breaks down, e.g. what percentage of people in a line have to cut in before everybody abandons the concept of forming the line.
I love this spirit.<p>In the office where I work, the main door locks whenever it closes, so the first person to arrive each morning props the door open for everyone else. Well, a new tenant moved in to one of the other units, and they started taking our doorstop. Morning after morning we had to go find it and retrieve it, for weeks! One day it occurred to me that I didn't have to complain to management, or get maintenance to deal with it, I could just <i>buy a bunch of doorstops</i>. The hallway is now liberally strewn with them, more doorstops than there are doors, and we haven't had to retrieve ours since.
This could have been a follow-up to "The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute"<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/</a>
My first teaching job was at an old, prestigious boys' boarding school in Australia. (When I say <i>old</i>, it was old for Australia.) Every boy, whether a boarder or day-boy, and every staff member received a hot lunch in the dining halls each day. There were two dining halls: most of the boys at in the less ornate one, but the oldest boys and the staff ate in the more formal dining hall. Portraits of all the previous headmasters gazed down on us as we ate, except for the headmaster who had been sacked after less than a year for having affairs with a few too many boys' mothers.<p>I was teaching a topic on ecology, which required taking the class out into the school grounds to count the number and diversity of species in an ecosystem. The school grounds were extensive; there were about two dozen playing fields, a small farm for teaching Agriculture (which is an actual, examined subject in some Australian secondary schools), and a lot of bushland.<p>In search of a suitable spot for the lesson, I headed off down one of the paths through the bush that went to the various boarding houses, and soon found a peculiar tree. It had few branches, and few leaves, but an enormous trunk: it was old and close to death. What made it peculiar, however, was the hundreds of knives sticking out of it - clearly pilfered from the dining halls and thrown by bored schoolboys.<p>When I returned to the science department, I told my colleagues what I had discovered. One of them was an old boy of the school, and another lived in one of the boarding houses, and yet none of them had any idea about the knife tree.
My partner and I donated cutlery to our Apt complex multipurpose media room. It's where people who live there can watch movies on a projector or have meetings or birthdays.<p>We bought over 50 teaspoons. I think we're down to 5. We got 10-15 each of knives forks and spoons and they were predated, but not as much.<p>The body corporate tut-tutted and said they wouldn't do it, I think it's ok to accept some people just wind up pilfering these things, and you deal with it. If you need flatware that badly, I don't mind.<p>Its 4-5 years in, we probably need to recommit. I don't know I'd go to the bother of etching or stamping anything.<p>My sister and I fought over who got the NAAFI (british army PX) fork with a hole in the handle. The hole was for a chain, which clearly somebody broke, to steal the fork, which wound up in our cutlery drawer at home in the 50s/60s.
There are so many problems that are solved by ones own money, and people not being jerks about it. I think a lot about how some bus stops will just have chairs that people leave there to offer seating when the city decided not to put any.
I'm doing the opposite. I've been amassing small disposable plastic spoons when I order food for my supplements from various establishments for my supplements, looking for ideal sizes. I like to use the one from coffee shops, the best ones were from the airport. Disposable wood chopsticks can be surprisingly durable as well as long as it's not basilica wood.<p>What counts as an ideal size/shape/material for your cutlery? I no longer use any metal because I once chipped my tooth on one, and often bang it against my teeth.
I love this story, despite it being the sort of thing I can imagine ending up on LinkedIn.<p>Anyway, one question I did have which made me a little suspicious of the neat ending: why is the fork in the last picture obviously of a different type to that shown in the engraving picture? The order was 180 forks all of the same type.<p>Maybe Henry bought his own forks to donate?
Makes me wonder if one were to take a 'college town', introduce tagged forks into the local dining facility at the beginning of the academic year, then beginning at midterms, start checking local thrift stores to see if they start "floating up". Increase these checks after the end of the academic year, to continue to chart when or if they appear.<p>From this, we can perhaps extrapolate a "fork drift" factor that the school could then use to determine future fork ordering? ;)
Fun post! Although is it saying they are using the previous apartment tenant's silverware? I feel like I've had to bring my own silverware to the apartments I lived in.
The corollary of Spoon Day.<p><a href="https://www.nthmonkey.com/spoonday/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nthmonkey.com/spoonday/</a>
Reading the title seemed like it was related to the Dining Philosophers problem. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem</a>
You can always identify cheap stainless steel cutlery from the sharp edges that cut into your skin while eating. Presumably the decent ones have extra manufacturing steps to polish off the burrs after stamping.
I did a similar thing at a startup where I was working as a consultant. We would constantly run out of coffee cups so I started smuggling in more cups each day, some 50 in total. Luckily they were using cheap IKEA mugs so the total cost was roughly 100 €.<p>The problem could have been solved in many ways but it was a nice hobby for me. I ended up switching to work there as an employee and have been for ten years. I still use the mugs so it worked out OK.
What he should have done was to create a foundation for supplying forks, making him and his roommate the officers of the foundation. They could have then solicited funds, including matching from other organizations. From those funds, they could have paid themselves handsome salaries for managing the foundation. Then with the mere pittance left over, they would then purchase forks. I'm sure that there would be other tax breaks in there somewhere to totally live a lavish lifestyle.
> The tenants who lived there the year before must have gone to Dewick and stolen some of the university’s silverware for themselves.<p>I think I've found the explanation for the original shortage.