the candy bowl

The top three things about my job:

1. Intellectual stimulation

2. My coworkers

3. The Law

The real top three things about my job:

1. My kids aren’t there

2. Free monthly firm lunch

3. Angie’s candy bowl

I’ve met some serious candy bowls in my day, but Angie’s takes the cake.  Angie is our payroll administrator/assistant bookkeeper, who, unfortunately for me, sits next to my secretary.  She is an all-around lovely person, but for my purposes, the most important thing to know about Angie is that she stocks a primo candy bowl.  None of that filler BS like Laffy Taffy, or the red and white mints you get for free at Chinese restaurants, or Necco wafers.  In desperate times I will choke down a Laffy Taffy–despite the oily film that is guaranteed to coat the inside of my mouth for the next two hours–and I’ve eaten my share of free mints.  But I consider people who will eat Necco wafers to be seriously flawed.

No Necco wafers for our Angie.  Just this: mini Almond Joy, Snickers, Three Musketeers; Dove chocolates; Hershey’s Kisses; the occasional bag of Whoppers.  Whole peanut butter cups, little bags of M&Ms and Reese’s Pieces, and finally, the king of all snack-size candy bars: the Funsize Twix.  Is there anything better than the Funsize Twix?  No, there is not.  There’s the chocolate, the caramel, the cookie.  All wrapped up in a dense little nugget of candy satisfaction that delivers supreme mouthfeel.  For the record, if you lay four Funsize Twix bars end to end, they are still technically smaller than a full-size Twix, not that I’ve ever checked.

I love Angie’s candy bowl, but I also hate it, because as may be evident, I am powerless to avoid its siren song.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  I usually do pretty well from 8:30 to 10:00 AM–the day is still new and the memory of my breakfast of green smoothie is usually fresh.  And I’m fine between noon and 1:00, because I’m usually eating lunch somewhere during that hour.  But between 10:30 and noon, I have no hope of avoiding the candy bowl unless I physically stay inside my office.  As for 3:00 to 5:00 PM, I might as well just sit in Angie’s lap, because that’s how often I’m at her station.  It’s embarrassing to admit that a candy bowl has that kind of power over you.

There are about four or five of us in the office who are habitual users.  We all know who the others are, and we keep silent tabs on who’s taking what, and how often.  The worst is when I casually drop by the candy bowl and find one of the other hyenas already at the watering hole.  Then I either have to make some lame joke about my addiction to the candy bowl, or pretend like I was just passing by.  Either option is a sure road to debasement.  I don’t mind the partner on my floor who clearly has a candy problem on par with mine–mostly because I don’t think he’s a Twix man–but I DO object to the others, who don’t even sit on my floor and regularly leave Angie’s station with fistfuls of Kit-Kats.  To those leeches, I say: get your own damn candy bowl.