BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns So the Boss wants me in on the "Big Biscuit Sting" team. People have been stealing biscuits from the Beancounters' tearoom, and the Beancounters want to know who's doing it. Obviously, the PFY and I are doing it, after we found out that the Beancounters have a financials shell game going …
Good job this was chocolate biscuits and not Jaffa Cakes or the VAT implications would be horrendous....
Plain biscuit - essential (Zero vat)
cake - essential (Zero vat)
Choc biscuit - luxury (pay vat)
Jaffa Cake "cake" with chocolate - essential (Zero vat)
I am so glad I didn't go into accountancy for a career.....
But the "tastes of disappointment" line is any chock digestive that is not McVities. (let the biscuit wars restart...)
I never understood the cake-or-biscuit controversy over Jaffa cakes. It's simple:
A cake is soft when fresh and goes hard as it gets stale.
A biscuit is hard when fresh and goes soft as it gets stale.
A Jaffa cake is soft when fresh & hard when stale so it's a cake! Yes, I know the chocolate layer on the top is hard but that applies to all chocolate-topped cakes & doesn't stop them being cakes.
Agreed cookie != biscuit. A cookie seems to be an amalgam of ground cereals and nust bonded with a soft edible thermoplastic, but not as soft as used for flapjacks which, in some ways, they resemble.
More tea & biscuits/cakes/cookies/flapjacks needed for investigation, methinks!
rather like custard in France
The French have custard but don't like to admit it, so they call it crème anglaise (English cream).
The world of food names is dangerous, as anyone choosing crème fraîche in France, thinking that it might match its literal translation of "fresh cream", will have learned. Goodness knows what they'd make of "spotted dick", perhaps something a pharmacist could help with? Then there's "jambon cru", which I've seen translated on menus as "raw ham", which may be linguistically correct but not culinarily so. Of course, a menu isn't the menu in France anyway, that's "la carte".
Bon appetit!
I was wondering this too. They are buggers they are, and I <know> that when they read "quantity 10" that working in IT, this "10" bit is actually binary. Because there is the first jaffa cake (when opened), and the last jaffa cake (when none left), but absolutely nothing in between. It's a mystery that can only be realised if "10" is binary for two.
It's the combination of orange and chocolate and poor "sponge" which means that any Jaffa Cakes in my house get eaten by others. I was extremely pleased to find a Terry's Chocolate orange mint the other day; much better combination.
As for chocolate digestives, dark is the only true coating. Some own-brand versions are acceptable if dark. Milk or - heaven forbid - that caramel type, nope; not even if McVitie's.
M.
Oh, I'm not laughing about the millions in VAT but, let's face it, tax rules frequently throw up odd distinctions because of their sometimes arbitrary nature.
For instance, edible snails are defined in the EU as "fish (land based)" so that snail farmers in France could get the same subsidies as fish farmers.
That someone got a PhD by proving something that's demonstrably obvious by just leaving the disputed products uneaten for a few days & observing how the change is, perhaps, funnier.
https://www.dnsassociates.co.uk/blog/cakes-biscuits-vat-charges
VAT assessable on
1. Biscuits completely or partially covered in chocolate (or a similar product in appearance and taste)
2. Any product of sweetened prepared food, apart from non-chocolate biscuits and cakes, which is typically eaten with fingers
Has the sticky chocolatey finger marks of the bean counting fraternity all over it.
According to the UK judiciary the coating on McVitie's digestives isn't chocolate which in the UK is a very low bar indeed. The palm oil in them is enough to give them a miss and in AU dark chocolate Tim Tam Dark on special are about half the price.
100% agree I forgot that key word in my post above.
I recently bought a packet of dark chocolate digestives but found when eating them that they were milk chocolate in the wrong packet, not good at all but as I had started on the packet and didn’t have a receipt there was no choice but to eat them. You can’t throw away good biscuits.
What, you're too bitter to eat them?
Anyhow, you made a typo with "White Chocolate Digestives". Look at the packet properly, they are simply "White Digestives" - No mention of chocolate at all. Look at other offerings - they too are "White" but not "White Chocolate". Look at the ingredients list if you don't believe me - no cocoa = not chocolate.
The whole industry is gaslighting the general public by selling a white palm-oil and sugar mix instead of proper white chocolate. Sorry to have ruined your day, but you'll never eat them again now that you know.
Our standard procedure on visiting a troublesome site is to take biscuits to share with 'The Workers'. Quality is proportional to the level of disaster envisaged, but the bar is set high.
Customer bosses have great difficulty following through with threats when their staff are supporting our endeavours.
Simon you almost owed me a new laptop at that line.
As an aside, I've never really encountered biscuit theft in a workplace. However I still recall one employer being rather eye-opening in that the company had two long-serving employees who used to routinely steal people's packed lunches out of the fridge.
Apparently if it wasn't in a named container it was considered fair game....never happened to me as I didn't dare keep food in the literally stinking fridge.
Many many years ago, in another life, I worked in the construction industry where we typically all brought a 'packed lunch' or a 'piece' as we would call it. One day whilst on a site and the boss had brought his German Shepherd, (Rambo) someone left the rear door of the van open and Rambo got into another colleagues 'piece bag' and devoured it. The rest of us were sympathetic and shared a little of our pieces with the unfortunate workmate. At the same time we howled with laughter at his realisation that a 'Sunblest' bag does not constitute secure storage for lunchtime sustenance. We continued to tease him the following day by enquiring 'What have you brought the dog for his piece today?'
My boss used to have a golden retriever that he would take along to work.
Apparently his significant other would go and buy baked goods and when arriving back at home, the dog would be given one paper bag with baked goodness, which the dog would then take in her mouth and bring to my boss to be shared between them. A nice little setup intil one day, while at work, the dog came wandering into my office, sniffed around in my bag, and found a paper bag with nice smelling baked goodnes that was waiting for late afternoon to come by, retrieved it and went back to my boss.
My boss thought that his significant other had come by, opened the bag, and proceeded to share with doggo.
Some time later I came back up from the workshop, went looking for my treat, and found none. "I could have sworn that...."
Only later did I go to my boss's office for some other business did I notice the empty paper bag in the trash and a very content looking doggo.
Some explanation was needed :)
To my shame (hence anon) I was once kicked out of the tea club for making too much tea! In my defence I was young, it was a manual job and putting the kettle on, waiting for the pot to mash etc let me take the weight of my plates and get through the day.
> I've had factory tea once - never again <shudder>
we had a tea/coffee swindle in our office in the 1980's, one girl brought a pint of milk in each morning and we got 2 or 3 cuppa's each during the day. we each put some cash in for the tea/coffee/milk
problems started when the group got slightly too large and the milk was not enough, so when it happened she just watered down the milk for the last round of drinks!
A colleague many years back told me of a former workplace where his wife would pack him a fine lunch, but someone at work began surreptitiously going through it each morning, taking a bite out of each item.
So they laced a lunch with, IIRC, phenothaline. Sure enough, a bite taken of every item that day. But never again. Phenothaline isn't toxic but it makes your pee blue. Or maybe purple. The mystery muncher got the message.
Imported, chocolate encased biscuits....Oh no, the beancounters have discovered Kimberleys ! (OK, to be pedantic, Borland's elite Kimberleys)
Of course they should be under lock and key, preferably with a heavily armed security guard in a defensive location (MIssion Control ?) to stop the unworthy getting them.
Many moons ago we had a tea lady [Brenda] who came round with a trolley morning and afternoon. I have to say that her tea was particularly foul on several occasions at which point I learned from another colleague [who refused to drink tea from the trolley] that the tea lady would use bleach to sanitise her tea towels and some other equipment. Now this was, an is, I believe illegal as bleach is toxic, but in any case it certaily explained the disgusting tea which occured after the tea towels had been "cleaned and sanitised". The comment I believe was "well it kills germs doesn't it?"
At that point I brought my own mug and tea bags in and made my own brews from that day forth even after getting an somewhat huffy "what's wrong with my tea?" comment. My office mate and I never drank trolley tea afterwards.
Mr Mulvihill used to bring me my morning cup of tea. It was vile stuff that I suspected got most of its metallic taste from dissolved tea spoons. I manage to drink it for the first couple of weeks to spare his feelings but after that it went untouched. After a few months more he thankfully stopped bringing me tea.
Some bugger in the past was always nicking peoples coffee. Had a good idea who, so I used most of a jar and then when near the end I crushed a load of senakot tablets into said jar and shook. The colour blended nicely.
Soon confirmed who it was. They even tried to get me to HR for it (now called poogate) until we pointed out they were stealing and well "I had a bit of IBS and I knew that I needed regular assistance and the tablets are horrid, but not too bad when mixed with the coffee and drunk, so that was my 'special' jar"
All the IBS stuff was crap, but HR would be unaware
We had a teacher in school who used to confiscate any sweets he found on kids in class. He would return them later, but reserved the right to eat as many as he wanted during the lesson.
One day we refilled a bag with hot sweets from the local joke shop, and one of the class chancers agreed to "get caught" with them. Teacher made his usual snarky comments, left the bag on his desk, and popped a couple in his mouth. A few minutes later he pulled out a hanky and made a show of blowing his nose, so he could surreptitously spit them out. He looked most discomfited for the rest of the lesson, but nothing was said. Sweets were never confiscated again...
Seems uncharacteristically friendly of the BOFH to keep the boss around. Not infrequently such a thing would have ended with the boss finding himself having a terrible accident or "confessing to his crimes" and taking the fast way down from the roof. Does the BOFH actually... like this one? Just needed to give him a good poke to keep him sharp?
I can see his dilemma, if he frames the boss then the beancounters have a win and that is just unacceptable, far better to scare but save the boss and embarrass the beancounters thereby hurting the real enemy and getting some useful gratitude from the boss.
A medical technician friend of mine once tracked down who was stealing the tea pool's soft drinks by adding a small amount of a harmless diagnostic chemical to each bottle.
Completely harmless, but with the side effect of turning the patient's urine bright red.
Apparently the screams from the gents' toilet could be heard for some distance.
The topic of adding stuff to drinks made me think of a case I read ages ago where a man was found guilty of a sexual offence after making tea for some of his female colleagues. One of the women thought the drink treated strange so gave it to a colleague to test (it was that kind of work place). They found semen in it.
I tried to find an online link to the case, but couldn't because scarily, this seems to have happened a lot.
...first job as a young engineer (1980), the facility had a cafeteria, where one could purchase coffee. Those in my group thought this was ridiculous, so we bought ourselves a coffee pot and I volunteered to collect a dollar each week and insure that there was always coffee and filters available. If one drained (or nearly drained) the pot, one was obligated to make a new one, with the coffee and filters provided.
This arrangement worked very well until Site Security became concerned that the coffee pot might not get turned off at the end of the day, and would thereby become a fire hazard. We engineers addressed this concern by adding a timer in line with the pot, so it turned off at quitting time and turned on in the morning. That was apparently not sufficient for Site Security, who insisted that the pot be removed. Now, by this time membership in our little coffee enterprise had grown to include many engineers in the area, and several managers. None of whom felt like going back and paying much more than $1 a week for the inadequate coffee in the cafeteria (not to mention the donuts I brought in on Fridays, since by this time the cash income more than covered the cost of coffee and filters). Words were had with upper management, and the coffee pot was given the all clear.
Selling cups of coffee is a very high profit business, and even moreso if one skimps on the grounds to water ratio. Now, of course, the correlation between caffeine and engineering output is well understood, and all but the most backward organisations provide unlimited high quality caffeinated beverages to their engineers free of charge.
In one job, about 30 years ago, the building owner brought in a coffee vending machine. And were charging 50p a cup .... for really shite coffee.
I worked out that I could acquire Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans, at around £30/pound, and it would still work out significantly cheaper than the really shite vending machine coffee.
I worked a lot with a company in Germany (pre-Brexit, of course) and they had a fancy coffee machine that was free for staff and guest use. The internal canteen staff looked after filling it with beans and milk, etc. The coffees were very good and often a good reason for a quick break and project discussion.
However, the touch screen control had over 4 pages of options, each page having about 6 items and some with variations on them. FFS do we need more than about 4 coffee variants (espresso, black, white-flat, and white-frothy milk)?
....except, when it was the Coffee People Black Tiger Shake. That *was* an ice cream, caffeine and sugar bomb, the way Jim & Patty intended. :) Late Eighties early Nineties, that was a weekly ritual on a thursday or friday afternoon after school, and later, at the office.
I'd advise not visiting the BCS's London show office then! They have this utterly useless tablet controlled drinks machine that has an appalling user interface, is somehow woefully unresponsive and as a result makes the process of picking a beverage and having it come out from the dispensing machine that's situated a few metres away a truly tortuous experience. They are very, very proud of this completely useless system and fought back strongly at any suggestions to just replace the damn thing with a machine that one can walk up to, push a button and the requested drink comes out almost immediately.
Although I haven't been to any events there for a couple of years now, therefore it may have been mercifully accidently dropped down a lift shaft by now.
However, the touch screen control had over 4 pages of options, each page having about 6 items and some with variations on them.
Still better than the old vending machines where you had to key in a 2-digit code to select tea, coffee, chocolate, soup etc. Someone with too much time on his hands drew up a matrix and worked out that the numbers corresponded to drink+extras, with bits set for sugar, milk, etc.
He demonstrated this by having the machine dispense chicken soup with milk and sugar.
Our company banned kettles and tea/coffee making stations for "image" purposes (ending the tea/coffee swindle mentioned earlier up the thread) for vending machines in neat plastic cups. They did however have to provide hot and cold water under some local site agreement, so we just used that.
When we relocated site however they go rid of the urn, so in the engineering office (where else!) they configured an empty filing cabinet with a kettle etc inside of it.
Eventually it rusted away from the inside out!
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