Editor’s note: Dennis Culpepper joins The Windy City Dispatch today as a general assignment reporter. Welcome aboard, Dennis.

To the readers of The Windy City Dispatch: hello. It’s me, Dennis Culpepper, your newest reporter, writing to you on my very first day at this incredible publication, in this incredible city, from a desk that still has the previous occupant’s sticky notes on the monitor. (I haven’t removed them. They feel like history.)

And speaking of history — that is exactly what was uncovered this week on the fourteenth floor of a LaSalle Street office building, where a routine refrigerator cleanout revealed a container of pasta salad that, based on its expiration date, was placed in the fridge during the Rahm Emanuel administration.

“We found it behind a row of LaCroix that turned out to be from 2021,” said office manager Denise Huang, who organized the cleanout after receiving what she described as “a strongly worded all-staff email from someone on the tenth floor who said the fridge smelled like ‘a museum of regret.’” The pasta salad, housed in a teal Tupperware container with a masking-tape label reading “GREG’S — DO NOT EAT,” bore a handwritten date of November 14, 2018.

No current employee named Greg works on the fourteenth floor. Building HR records suggest that the most recent Greg departed in early 2020. “That means this pasta salad has outlasted at least three Gregs and a pandemic,” Huang said. “It has more institutional memory than most of our senior staff.”

The discovery prompted a full archaeological survey of the refrigerator, conducted by Huang and two interns over the course of an afternoon. Among the findings: a yogurt from February 2022 that had “evolved into something we declined to open,” a Ziploc bag of what was once identified as grapes, and a Post-it note on the second shelf reading “CLEAN ME — THIS MEANS YOU, BRIAN” in handwriting that matched no current employee.

This reporter, who placed his own carefully labeled lunch in the fourth-floor refrigerator of The Windy City Dispatch this morning — his first morning, if that wasn’t clear — found the story both fascinating and cautionary. The office fridge is a shared space, a social contract, a commons. And like all commons, it is subject to tragedy.

Facilities management has confirmed that the teal Tupperware has been disposed of, though Huang said she briefly considered mounting it in the break room “as a warning.” The company has now implemented a Friday fridge purge policy, under which any unlabeled or expired items will be discarded without ceremony. “We’re drawing a line,” Huang said. “The fridge is not a time capsule. It is not a storage unit. It is a place for food you intend to eat this week, and I will enforce that with the full weight of my authority.”

Greg, if you’re reading this: your Tupperware is gone, but your legacy endures. And to the readers and editors of The Windy City Dispatch: thank you for having me. This is the start of something special. I can feel it. Dennis Culpepper, signing off from the break room. My lunch is clearly labeled. I’m not making Greg’s mistake.