This week’s British Medical Journal has tackled the thorny problem of disappearing teaspoons in the office environment. Their experiments show the average half-life of a teaspoon is 81 days, which means that you would need 250 teaspoons per year to maintain a constant population of 70 teaspoons in an organisation. Indeed:
If we assume that the annual rate of teaspoon loss per employee can be applied to the entire workforce of the city of Melbourne (about 2.5 million), an estimated 18 million teaspoons are going missing in Melbourne each year. Laid end to end, these lost teaspoons would cover over 2700 km — the length of the entire coastline of Mozambique — and weigh over 360 metric tons — the approximate weight of four adult blue whales.
The authors of the report propose a possible explanation, namely that teaspoons exhibit resistentialism. (Resistentialism is the belief that inanimate objects have a natural antipathy towards humans, and therefore it is not people who control things but things that increasingly control people). Alternatively, they propose that:
Somewhere in the cosmos, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, walking treeoids, and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, a planet is entirely given over to spoon life-forms. Unattended spoons make their way to this planet, slipping away through space to a world where they enjoy a uniquely spoonoid lifestyle, responding to highly spoon oriented stimuli, and generally leading the spoon equivalent of the good life.
It’s good to see this important topic is finally being researched properly – for more details, read the full BMJ report here.
