Somebody put out a whole shopping bag full of Hershey’s Kisses in the break room sometime on Friday night. I was the only one in the office on Sunday. I think that maybe there’s a slight chance that I ate an excessive amount of Kisses…
A proverb says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’m starting to think that so are the roads to saddlebags and love handles…
I got into work on Sunday and found the bag in the break room while I was getting water. I didn’t think too much about it, grabbed a Kiss and got to work. Because I drink water like a camel in a desert, I was back in the break room in 5 minutes (or maybe I subconsciously just wanted more chocolate…hmm…) Anyway, this trip I brought a small handful back to my desk with me. Those lasted maybe 15 minutes. The next trip didn’t even disguise itself as a water run. I went to the break room and did a two-handed grab of chocolatey delight.
In my defense, my intention was to 1) use chocolate as a reward to help motivate me to work and 2) save the majority of them for Monday. The system started out well. I divided out my reward pile and put the rest away. I got back to work and rewarded myself with a Kiss whenever I finished steps of my project. This is where the system started unravelling. Soon, my goals to reach Kiss-dom were fairly small. As in “I found the page with the information I need…Kiss!” And thus my reward pile dwindled.
The problem really started when my reward pile was all gone after I had finished something actually deserving of a reward. And what’s the point of a reward system if you don’t get a prize at the end? So I broke into the ‘tomorrow’ stash.
I was on a roll in my project at that point and was kind of cruising along. All of a sudden, I looked over at the Gigantic Pile of foil that had accumulated on my desk and had one of those “who ate all of my Kisses?” moments. It was then that I decided that I really did need to put the chocolate away before I accidentally ate my calculator without realizing it…
Except for then my OCD-esque tendencies kind of took over. Because I couldn’t put the chocolate away when the number of Kisses in each color of foil wasn’t even. I had to fix the foil issue before storing the chocolate. So I ate more…
After things were all even, the pile looked pretty small. It was at that point that I decided it probably wasn’t worth “going through the hassle” of saving just a few chocolates. I guess I could liken it to Joey on Friends worrying about becoming the kind of guy who only eats half a Power Bar and then saves the rest for later. I mean really. So I finished them off and ended the day when I ate approximately my body weight in Hershey’s Kisses…
All in all, I do not find it to be coincidental that my dessert consumption is directly proportionate to the amount of overtime that I work.
