Was it Really About the Wasabi Peas?

How I became a "Karen" before 9am

I was already in a foul mood — probably because a train decided, with infuriating timing, to park itself across the only road between me and my commute. I inched through the arctic on the ferry, finally made it to my office, and exhaled — half relief, half sarcasm — that no lifeboats had to be dispatched today.

Then I entered what can only be described as the world’s most over-engineered elevator system.

Six different banks of eight elevators. You type your floor into a kiosk like you’re booking a flight, the machine assigns you a car, and still — somehow — half the people ignore this and just jump into whatever elevator lights up with their number. The result is a crowded metal box that stops at approximately ten floors on the way, with strangers breathing down your neck like we’re all late for the same very important, vaguely unhinged cult meeting.

I finally make it to my floor, heart rate elevated, patience thin — and there is no line for the coffee machine.

Score.

I line up my cup and lid like I’ve done this a thousand times. I press the button. And that’s when I see it — the blinking orange light. The universal corporate symbol for: this is broken, and we will not explain why.

Fine. I pivot. Water it is.

As I ride the coffee-only elevator back down, one thought nags at me: did anyone actually report this, or are we all just waiting for the next snack reconnaissance mission — the sacred daily pilgrimage to refill the wasabi peas container?

Because the wasabi peas are eternal.

Nobody eats them, yet they are religiously topped off (like the hand sanitizer), as if persistence might eventually convert us. They feel less like food and more like an office rule no one remembers agreeing to.

Today when I left the office, the container was empty, which felt almost suspiciously hopeful. I pictured some caffeine-deprived renegade finally snapping — dumping the whole bin into a trash bag and hoping their sacrifice might bring literally any other snack.

By 8:45 a.m., my email to the Workplace Experience powers-that-be already contained an unholy trinity of corporate complaints: a Code Brown in the first stall, a broken coffee machine, and my growing resentment toward the eternal wasabi peas.

Somewhere between the Code Brown and the blinking orange light, I could feel her forming — the office Karen. Not a monster, not a tantrum, just a woman who noticed things that were broken and couldn’t NOT say them out loud.

One minute I was a reasonable adult; the next I was Kate-from-the-35th-Floor, emailing about no almond milk, a broken coffee machine, and bathroom emergencies, wondering if the price of “free snacks” was turning me into an entitled Karen.

All of this while the 38th floor (I was told) — the promised land above us — apparently lives in a nut-filled utopia. People drift up there like pilgrims. Nuts, gummy bears, M&Ms — a full-on snack paradise.

Down on 35, we get wasabi peas and granola, day after day, as if no one eats them because no one wants to clean the container, so it’s easier to just keep topping them off.

So I’m stuck bouncing between two thoughts.

On one hand: this is ridiculous. I am a grown woman spiraling over snacks and almond milk. I get paid; I can buy my own effing snacks. Why do I feel so ungrateful?

On the other: this is a company with tens of thousands of employees and a global logistics machine — and yet, somehow, almond milk at its own world headquarters keeps running out. A firm that can track a transaction across continents in milliseconds cannot, apparently, keep almond milk in a fridge on the 35th floor.

So I’m left wondering if this is really about wasabi peas at all.