Take Your Waffle Iron To Work Day

Not long after I started my dot-com era job I found myself in Williams-Sonoma with a coworker over lunchtime; and not long after that, I found myself in possession of this waffle maker.

This presented me with a conundrum, as I had to wonder just how often I would actually make waffles at home. Since my then-only son was still in the liquid food phase at that point, it seemed like it was going to be many years before I would amortize the cost of my purchase over a sufficient quantity of waffles to not feel like each one was costing me about ten dollars.

As the waffle iron sat in its box under my desk awaiting its journey home, the thought then occurred to me: why does it have to go home at all?

This was the dot-com era, admittedly, when foosball tables and coolers full of Fantasia juices were just part of the bold new world inventing a new economy untroubled by such crude, 1.0 tools as revenue and profitability, but I wasn't asking my bosses to hire a chef to cook the entire staff waffles every morning. That was in itself a 1.0, Old Economy way of thinking-- top-down waffling.

Instead, empowered by the decentralization of the workplace in the New Economy, by the technological disintermediation of Big Waffle in favor of a radically new wafflemaking model which literally put the power to make waffles on every desk-- I decided to mix up a big batch of waffle mix (my proprietary blend, which involves 3/4 of the mix from a Jewel box of pancake flour--the kind you have to add eggs, milk and oil to-- combined with 1/4 of the multigrain pancake mix from Whole Foods) and bring it, along with some syrup and some plastic forks and plates (or those may have been supplied by the company, I forget) and plug the wafflemaker into the same power strip as my smokin' gray Powerbook.

The reaction was everything I could have hoped for; as the smell permeated the office, people were irresistibly distracted from whatever problems of inventing the future they were dealing with at the moment and started wandering the halls, sniffing, finally ending up in the vicinity of my desk saying, disbelieving the evidence of their own noses... "Does it smell like waffles in here?"

Then they would see that, in fact, two or three of their coworkers were actually standing there, paper plate in hand, chomping on a freshly cooked waffle ladled in real maple syrup (it was the dot-com days; nothing but the best). Shyly, like Charlie Bucket asking for a bar of chocolate, they would say "Can I have one?" The answer was always yes, in the newly democratized wafflespace that I had created, and the gratitude in their eyes after years of soul-depriving chain bagels being the only breakfast food allowed into the workplace was truly a glorious thing to behold. Like in Berlin '89, the blue-gray fabric walls of a cubicle farm were being torn down and replaced with the edible brown walls of Waffletopia, and people who spent their professional lives avoiding each other for reasons of departmental differences found themselves actually chatting and enjoying waffles together across company lines.

I kept Waffle Day infrequent enough, and under the radar enough, that it never attracted the attention of the sort of people who would have felt some urge to get granular and formulate Waffle Policy (as a subset of Non-Authorized Electrical Equipment Safety in the Workplace). You never knew when Waffle Day might happen, but just when you needed it most, the smell of fresh-made waffles would sneak over your wall like the sirens sweetly singing to brave Ulysses.

The years have passed and my children are now grown enough that we have waffles, oh, at least a couple of times a month. Maybe because it wasn't meant to ride the subway regularly, my Cuisinart waffle iron died young and a Krups one with higher capacity has since replaced it. But the memory of Waffle Day lives on; and if you have a workplace badly in need of some subversion of a type so cheerful and impossible to dislike that almost no management could be flinthearted enough to object to it, may I suggest that you consider carrying on the tradition of Waffle Day where you work, in memory of those sweet days when we were dot-commers once, and young.

MG,

Unbeknownst to both of us at the time, we both worked for the same company (as you know) and I remember that they usually provided lunch for us everyday, plus they doubled my day rate, and when the company was sold one year after I left, the total amount of my final paycheck was actually a measurable percentage of their final sale price. Plus, their stock went from around $85 to about 25 cents/share.

I blame your damn waffles.

Hammond

Actually, Waffle Day originated at the company which that company bought, and so I'm sure it was largely responsible for the fat payout its founders received from the suckers, er, visionary geniuses we both later worked for.