When You Come to a Fork in the Cabinet...Take It

(The CBS Broadcasting Complex and Deli) Radio stations are strange places in the wee-hours before everyone arrives.

There is a barely-perceptible buzz in the hallways, either from some station monitor standing sentry in an empty cubicle, or a muffled, dull thumping from a production studio already in use by a morning team finishing up pre-show production.

I generally arrive before 650AM has even signed on for the day, but there is still an urgency that drives all activities towards the time the mic is first opened for the morning.

Today I began my morning on a quest for a plastic fork, with a tub full of chopped fruit teasing me for breakfast.
You would think that in a facility with four kitchen areas, there’d be one left over plastic-ware pak from a Chik-Fil-A visit, or maybe a half-used box of Chinette crystal.
Nope.
Nada.
Zilch.

In one cupboard I did find an opened box of plastic ware with no spoons or forks, and half of the knives remaining. Good to know in case anyone needs an emergency appendectomy up here on the weekends.

Hudson and Harrigan even helped me comb through the relics of fast-food repasts past, trying out a few of their un-used jokes on my food-starved brain.
No forks, though.


In the Executive coffee bar was an assortment of items, including a drawer full of IBM Selectric typewriter ribbons, and an extra font ball. (If you don’t know what those are for, perhaps a separate essay may be in order on the virtues of composing content on the keyboard of a machine designed solely for the purpose of mechanically imprinting sheets of cellulose fiber with individual letters to form words and sentences.)

Also in the Executive kitchen were the final resting places of morning show coffee cups from Radio stars of the past, including the Lisa Dent Show, which used to air on KIKK-FM, back before it was Smooth Jazz, back before it was Hot Hits. Such is the legacy that Radio stations leave behind.

It looked like my only option was going to be a bastardized usage of coffee stir sticks, pressed into service as plastic chop sticks. Not the most efficient way to eat fruit…but you get the idea.

Finally in the last cupboard in the last kitchen area in the farthest corner of the complex…almost in a galaxy far, far away, I discovered a lonely matched set of plastic-handled utensils, Mr. and Mrs. Cheesy Knife and Fork. Probably left over from some picnic basket giveaway from a food promotion from a summer gone by, now standing at attention in a ceramic mug, filed under September.

Breakfast was worth the wait.
Nothing like fresh fruit in the morning, sliced days ago in a grocery deli.

Now, I wonder where I can find a styrofoam cup for some ice water this morning…?