The S&P indesk.

Recently cleaned out the desk and found these:

Too good to throw away, too unnecessary to use, they accumulate in the desk until:

• You leave the workplace, and the desk and its contents become the next guy's problem.
• You sneak them into the office kitchen where they join 10,000 other such packets and become everybody's problem.
• You throw them away and say the hell with it.

I don't even get takeout very often, so I don't know how I got these. They seem to multiply in the desk. But the variety of fonts tells me they are not even directly related. 

If I were to just pitch these, how much salt and pepper would I actually be throwing away? I wondered. So I brought them home and emptied them out.

Hard to tell how much that is. I have about the same amount of each, so I put the pepper in a sliding measuring spoon.

About half a teaspoon. So it wouldn't be much to lose, even if I just threw the packets away. Of course, coming from a Depression-educated family, I thought of the pepper mines that are being used up, the salt trees being stripped to provide this savor, and I still couldn't bring myself to just throw out the spices. Wars are fought over spices! You remember the Dutch-Portuguese War? The Anglo-Dutch Wars? Dune? No, I couldn't waste such an important resource; I had to put the salt and pepper in the shakers. 

Of course, the plastic utensils that came with these packets are in a landfill somewhere by now, but that's the way it goes!