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Meal Prep 2

The Mild Wife and I like to prep meals for the entire week, in part because it makes the logistics for us easy during the week. It's that much easier to bring lunch if you just grab a Tupperware container from the fridge. There are associated benefits with that (it's probably healthier to make your own food), but, honestly, the biggest draw for me is how much time it saves on a day-to-day basis. I just don't have to think about it. Grab a container, stick it in the lunch bag, and be on your way.

However, no plan that involves people is completely fool-proof, so there are inevitably miscues during this process. You see, we usually the Tupperware containers for both individual meals and for left-overs that are meant to be shared. That means that some containers are meant to be used for lunch, and some are decidedly not meant to be taken to work for lunch. Guess who screwed that up once before?

Now, I like chili, and I will happily eat it alone for lunch, but that was not the intended plan. I'm fairly certain that threw off the meal plan for a couple of days, because I now had one fewer lunch and one less pre-planned dinner for the two of us.

So, how does one respond to such an occasion? In my case, I resolved to be more careful about which containers I grabbed out of the fridge. I will also poke a utensil to the bottom of the container if I can't physically see all the way down, as a secondary precaution. I figure it's a reasonable set of precautions, since it helps to prevent the accidental screw up with Tupperware containers.

As it turned out, the Mild Wife had a different solution. The Tupperware containers we grab for lunches are usually on the top shelf, so she simply stopped putting the left-over meal containers on the top shelf. I will give her a lot of credit: she realized what my habit was without me even saying anything, and she compensated for said habit. In fact, I didn't realize this was the plan until I put some left-overs away in the fridge, and she commented that they should go on the bottom shelf. Once she explained the rationale, I saw the beauty of the plan.

I have to say, this seems like a cleaner solution than mine. Rather than having to put in more thought and effort to double check the contents of a particular Tupperware container, I can rely on convention and think even less. We talk about these sorts of things at work, where you focus on the usability or user experience (the phrase "delight users" is bandied about on occasion), so it was doubly amusing for me to see one such experience in the wild.

Apparently, this is what it means to be married: I only get top shelf lunches, thank you very much.

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