My husband was telling me the other night about all of the ways his company has cut back.  They’ve bought coffee machines that don’t require maintenance, and they’ve cut back on janitorial staff.

As a result, though, nothing is getting done.  The coffee pots are never getting cleaned, because they don’t fit in the sinks in the kitchenettes, and there’s no one to come around and do them.  Cleaning the refrigerator has fallen to my husband and a few other people who rotate each week.

Now the fridge is one of my husband’s pet peeves.  It’s shared by something like 30 or 40 people, yet many people seem to think it’s their right to store a week’s worth of food in there.  Then there are people who put open containers of soup in the door, so that they shoot soup all over everything ever time you shut it (this happened to him a few weeks ago, when it was his rotation to clean the fridge).

So when my husband cleans out the fridge, he is ruthless about it.  He sends everyone an email a couple of days before, and then again that morning.  Inevitably there is someone who says, “I didn’t get the email reminder!” or “I didn’t see it on the calender!”  (Which is a hoot because he doesn’t put it on the calender, and never has — shouldn’t an email reminder in your inbox be enough?)

I wonder if some kind of team management software could help in a case like this.  I think you’d have to have it for other things than just the weekly fridge cleaning, or no one would check it.  But some type of group management software that required people to RSVP and acknowledge the reminder might make my husband’s life a little easier on Fridge-Cleaning Fridays, because then people couldn’t complain and say they never saw the reminder.

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