h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's interesting trying to share a standard-sized fridge with around fifteen other people - especially if your university / college / whatever holds a weekly shuttle service to a nearby supermarket. There's a race to get back to the fridge first, and the winner can dump their food inside without too many problems. What little space there is left is taken up by Person 4's shopping, and Persons 5 to 16 then get to play the '3D Squishy Food Jigsaw ' game, which involves trying to bend your cucumber to fit round someone else's yoghurts.

Then there are the ritual arguments that take place over whether you should refrigerate:

a) eggs
b) tomato ketchup
c) whole loaves of bread etc.

Of course, cramming a fridge with vast amounts of food has one or two side effects. It's incredibly easy to forget, in the face of so much food, just what you have left in there, meaning that bits of salami, old cheese and half-portions of Mystery Casserole get pushed to the back of the fridge and slowly mutate. Vegetables left in the salad drawer go soft and turn into soup, and - well, I don't think I need to say anything about milk.

But it's character-building, isn't it?

Azimuth

In our house we have four people. Yesterday we discovered four jars of pasta sauce which nobody recognised, nobody knew anything about them... scary.

I've discovered a very efficient way of surviving a day (I haven't attempted longer) if you can't be bothered to cook or have no food. I buy a six-roll pack of Refreshers and eat them continuously through the day. The downside is that the inside of your mouth gets covered with blisters...

Our fridge is shared between six. Three are a little minimalist (I myslef am happy with one small corner of teh fridge providing I get most of that little freezer drawr at the bottom of any fridge/freezer. The otehrs liek lots of odd foods which I'm sure are breeding with the jar of mayonaise that is living at the back of my fridge space and is trying to corrupt my hot-lava Java. We also often have my Danish flatmates curries mutating in there. The tupperware containers have never really recovered from those.

Eggs are always refrigerated.

Ketchup somtimes gets refrigerated, sometimes not. Currently I've got the "normal" ketchup in the cupboard, the imported German Curry-Ketchup in the fridge (i've moved up in the world, to only studying part time and working full time), as well as the Heinz 57. In my student days, everything would not have gone into my mini-fridge. The only thing in my mini-fridge would have been the drinkie-poos (including the oranges shot full of vodka) and the leftover chinese food (or one of my cramped kitchen concoctions).

Bread: mushy store kind goes in the fridge. Fresh bakery kind goes in the breadbox.

I would freeze bread for later or possably refrigerate teh cheap stuff I buy but I eat so much bread as toast that its hardly worth it. The odd think I keep is my Java cofee because it is not instant cofee and teh ground stuff keeps better in teh fridge (And makes teh fridge smell nicer)

The arguments were never about whether items of food *needed* to be refrigerated; they were more closely linked to the size of the items in question - someone refrigerating a massive Tupperware container containing one fairy cake was liable to get lynched the next morning; the same went for whole loaves of bread. If the items were crushable, you'd probably find them rammed towards the back of the fridge. If the items weren't crushable, you'd just get beaten round the head with them.

If there was more than one fridge in the student kitchen, I found the best tactic was to indulge in a bit of fridge subterfuge and distribute items between all of them; it's harder to determine just how much space you're taking up...

Azimuth

My halls of residence came up with an ingenious idea. Get one big fridge for a kitchen of about 20 and seperate it out into 20 little compartments big enough for six eggs, some bacon, some sausages and a two pint container of milk (usually it could stand upright too) and possably some cheese. It also had a lockable door on each compartment. Whiel it was annoying to have to giev a fried keys to go and get your milk it did stop otehr people nicking your fridge space. The only real problem was that teh person in teh slot above you could remove the base of his or her space and steal yoru stuff causing an extended kitchen vigil to find the owner of teh space above yours. vigils were also heard to catch the perosn whos milk spilt and dripped on the four spaces below and the person who got drunk and managed to tip the whole thing over. Still, it stopped people nicking your fridge space.

We have two normal size fridges for 12, and it actually works. Everyone has one shelf, and a half fridge door compartment. I've been living in a student room for about 4 years now, and not once has my food disappeared or my shelf got invaded by someone else.

we have one normal size fridge between 6 and its hell. Possably because three of my flatmates all shop together and so invade any space to fit their stuff in. Oh, and people never realise that milk bottles from Tesco don't have any seals around teh lid and will drip once truned on their sides.

Oooh, I hate that - I've had several experiences where I've opened the fridge door to be confronted with a sludgy semi-dried milk pool at the bottom of the fridge.

It's almost as fun as when someone leaves a can of Coke in the freezer cabinet to chill it quickly, then forgets to take it out...

(and yes, I've done that myself before now)

Makes a helluva mess, but the resulting Coca Cola ice-slush is incredibly nice

Azimuth

I know people leaving beer too long in the freezer. Just as messy. Stranger was my flat last year. It had a fridge but for some strange reason the two vegetable holding bits seemed to freeze the food, No matter how you adjusted teh fridge temperature. My flatmates kept producing cryogenically frozen tomatoes and cucumbers all year.

We have a big fridge between four of us and it always leaks. Someone left some sort of alcoholic concoction (with copious amounts of cranbery juice, vodka, wine and beer) for two months and it stated to change colour. I think it might be still there. I haven't looked in the fridge for fear that it's grown legs and decided to take over the world.

If you want rid of teh concoction, Throw a party, someone will drink it. Actually, at a party someone unplugged our fridge to run the toaster and teh toasy machine at teh same time. They were confused as to why this was wrong.

Someone recently drank the concoction after the aforementioned advice was taken and was imediately sick all over the kitchen floor. It had greeny, white floating things in it but he was so drunk I don't think he noticed

I share a fridge with three other guys but none of them has the faintest idea how to cook so I generally have free rein. The one problem that arose was when one of their girlfriends left an unmarked tub of face cream (don't ask why) in there - I thought it was natural yogurt and put it in a curry I was making. We all thoroughly enjoyed the Tikka Masala a la Oil of Olay until she went to fetch her little tub and discovered it on the worksurface with a spoon in. Needless to say, she doesn't put her makeup in the fridge any longer.

I also found an ingenious way to stop people nicking food late at night - borrow a medic's practice skull and put it on one of the shelves. Drunken foodnappers tend to find someone else's fridge more inviting...

lol
Last year I gave up trying to keep anything in the fridge in halls.
I didn't have any milk for an entire term

Also has ny1 frozen housemates possesions?

We had a friend stay over (in a chair in the front room) and for some reason we decided to put his shoes in a bowl of water and leave them in the freezer, hehe
It took him awhile to get to lectures in the morning

Actually, for a rather annoying thing, in my last year I lived in a block of on campus flats. Now, not much of value was kept in teh kitchen and since there was an entryphone system our kitchen door went unlocked for most nights. This oon changed when stuff from our fridge (And cupboards) went mysteriously Missing. As we were all confused as tehre was no evidence of someone in teh flat stealing stuff (Empty containers in bin that sort of thing) and we were utterly confused, until one night one of my flatmates was watching TV in the kitchen with the lights off and someone who didn't live in the flat wondered in and went for teh fridge. On seeing my flatmate there the raider paniked and ran. My flatmate recognised her as someone from one of teh otehr flats in our block. After posting a "We know hwat you're up to" message on our fridge door one of our flatmates stangd a daring dawn raind where she wondered into the opposing flat and liberated several items. Still damn impolite stealing from anothers fridge.