I'll Kill you With a Tray

At work we have a café on our ground floor where you can buy Breakfast/ Lunch/ snack/ teas and coffees etc. People generally buy teas and coffees in bulk for their team. It saves everyone going down and you only have to go down once a week or day depending on what you and your team do. When a 'round' is bought they carry the tea/ coffee back in a cardboard tray device. The café likes to recycle these trays so they ask that you bring them back. People never do.

This where I come in. When I first started I got stupidly sick of find cardboard trays lying around everywhere. One day I flipped and went around the trading floor and collected them all and I took them down to the café. After doing this twice, I realised I was doing other people’s dirty work for nothing so I started asking around what was in it for me.

“If you take 50 down to them they will give you a free tea or coffee. Hardly worth it so everyone throws them away.” One of the traders told me. Granted a cup of tea does only cost 40p from down stairs but that’s 40p I could potentially save! Not that I buy tea down there anyway. 40p is a rip off! I bring my own tea bags in and take my mug down and ask them to fill it with hot water. (Yes I’m that tight but I’d rather have an extra 40p in my purse than pay for a tea I could make myself!)

So since then, I’ve been collecting 50 trays and taking them down for my free cup of tea. I’ve got a bit of reputation for it and people give me a bit of stick. It’s all in good gesture so no need to ring HR over it. But still, I had to show them that it was worth it.

So yesterday, I went down with 100 trays!
“Instead of tea, may I have a muffin today? I bought down 100 trays.”
“You know the rules, I can only give you tea or coffee.”
“Please, I worked so hard to collect all of these!”
“I can’t.”“Fine, I’ll take 50 back and bring them down to tomorrow for a tea then.”
“Are you seriously going to take 50 back upstairs?”
“Are you seriously going to deny the only person in this whole building who return the trays a muffin or at very least a piece of cake?”
“Okay, I’ll give you cake but only this once!”
“Deal.”

So I went back upstairs with my cake and now all those who laughed at me for collecting cardboard trays looked on in envy.

Who ever said you can’t have your cake and eat it too clearly never collected trays!