Return to office resulting in these thefts at shocking rates

It’s a big fork you to workers everywhere.

As employees have been returning to their offices, eating utensils have been vanishing from workspaces worldwide at shockingly high rates, the Wall Street Journal reported.

It’s reached the point where everyday people like Ben Stiller, who works for Canada’s National Truck League, have deputized themselves as the “fork police” of their offices.

He’s utilized the sending of shameful emails to his colleagues in an attempt to guilt the, as he calls them, “fork stealers” into returning the metallic goods.

Still, his efforts were about as successful as trying to eat soup with the pronged implement.

“They all came back, and then two weeks later, they were all gone again,” Stiller, who grew tired of seeing only spoons in the office, told the Journal.

“We never solved the problem.”

Meanwhile, Nicola Williams, an office manager in London, finds herself ordering 100 new communal cutlery items every six months or so — the office only sees about 125 workers on a good week.

“I’ve sent out emails saying, ‘We’re missing quite a few forks,’” Williams, who works for the financial media company PEI Group, said.

The blood sport for forks has inspired product manager Jennifer Ta to get into work early and ahead of her co-workers on her one in-person day per week.

Immediately, she speeds to the kitchen to nab a fork in addition to a mug and teaspoon simply “because everything in the kitchen is a hot commodity,” said Ta, who many times has been left high and dry without an eating device at work.

“I am not risking it,” added Ta, who from time to time has taken items like a fork home.

Another factor at play are eco-friendly practices being implemented by offices across the globe — 60% in the US and Canada have per a 2021 poll by Captivate — which eradicated many single-use plastic utensils, thus leaving reusables in a substantially higher demand.

“I used to walk halfway around the building looking for a fork,” said Mike Williams, a documentary and podcast producer in Sydney.

After inadvertently collecting 20 office forks (that his wife made him return), Williams described the bizarre phenomenon as a “crisis facing lunchrooms across the country.”

“When you get a fork, you inherently want to hold on to the fork,” Williams said.

Utensil marauders were even studied in a 2020 paper published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

Researchers at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital were unable to produce a concrete answer on where the utensils in the medical facility’s break room went and even suggested radio frequency identification chips as a way to keep the drawers full.

Still, like in the case of Williams, the honor system had prevailed in some cases, as researchers observed the return of some forks. They just weren’t ones originally from the hospital’s break room, according to lead research author and Royal Brisbane Chief Medical Officer Mark Mattiussi.

“That’s the phenomenon of the fork resurrection,” he said.