July 10, 2009

Furlough Friday: Dig your way out with plastic

Fear not, all ye without optimal work situations. Furlough Friday returns with money saving tips for the most depraved of the jobless. Life from Pennsylvania ... it's Furlough Friday!

As worklessness drags on and bills pile up, trips to the pawn shop and scrapyard can take a bite out of the best-stocked home. Goodbye fine china, so long artwork and farewell, silverware.

The only problem is that eating a steaming bowl of furlough-fine 50-cent macaroni and cheese with your hands is a painful, sloppy proposition. Even if you were forced to sell every last salad fork, you need some sort of utensil for eating. And if you're chronically unable to use chopsticks like me, whittling down some twigs from the front yard isn't going to help much.

Fortunately fast food restaurants stock plastic silverware. When you get a Toffee Coffee Twisted Frosty on your furlough day, make sure to keep the frosty spoon. Slipping an extra plastic fork from the tray whenever possible isn't a bad idea either. Pretty soon you can build up an impressive stock of plastic silverware for home use, wash, and reuse.

Try not to think about the strange chemicals from the plastic seeping out after a few washes. The way things are going, we might not have enough cash to feed ourselves, so we won't be living long enough to worry about poking our livers over the edge with little synthetic fork prongs.

There are also nice packages of plastic silverware that claim to be "dishwasher safe." I bought one the other day while in a pinch for utensils. Dishwasher capability wasn't actually one of my prerequisites when buying the pack, but I take every bonus I can find right now.

Those of you who are too honest to pocket an extra spork from Taco Bell might want to take the store-bough plastic silverware route. A box of 24 spoons cost 69 cents and could last me years. Sure, they sometimes break when digging in the bottom of a big peanut butter jar, but nothing's perfect. They're a lot more useful than the plastic in my wallet right now.

Plastic silverware is the only way to eat while laid off. It's cheap, reusable, and has that barely-made-my-mortgage feel that's so chic these days.

Plus, it serves as a visual reminder that you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth.

1 comment:

  1. Your blog is awesome.

    Your reviews are eloquent, insightful, and always entertaining. I'm obsessed with food, so I'll be visiting often.

    New item I recently discovered: Herrs Russet Dark Potato Chips. You'll never look at chips the same way again.

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