The prevalence of remote work has changed a lot of things in our world. From traffic patterns during rush hour to restaurant usage in downtown areas to what people are regularly wearing from the waist down that can’t be seen on Zoom or Teams calls, the reality of many people working from home has reordered our lives in more ways than we can list.
Here’s another change that you might not have considered yet: what are you going to do with that inevitable cache of leftover Halloween candy? You know, the excess that was created because you don’t want to be caught in the dreaded predicament of being the only house on the block to run out of candy while Beggars’ Night is still going strong, so you bought an extra bag or two of “snack size” candy bars and little boxes of Milk Duds?
In the pre-pandemic world, the solution to disposition of the excess Halloween candy was easy and obvious: because you didn’t want to keep the tempting little goodies in the house for fear that you would fall into a chocolate consumption frenzy, you took the leftovers to the office. Once your supply of candy was placed in a bowl next to the coffee machine, you could be confident that the candy would be fully and happily consumed by anonymous officemates within hours, if not minutes.
But with remote work, those rapacious hordes aren’t at the office every day anymore, and the office coffee station isn’t the hub of frantic consumption that it was in days of yore. You’re not going to be able to rely on “taking it to the office” to get rid of that leftover candy, unless the federal government declares an emergency and orders everyone to return to their offices for National Candy Consumption Day on the Monday after the Halloween weekend, to assist in the Snickers and Reese’s and SweeTarts disposition effort.
Give it some thought before you go out to buy your trick or treat candy this year and come up with your preferred approach. Do you buy less, to avoid any excess? Or do you follow your standard “avoid a shortfall” overbuying approach, and figure out an alternative method of getting rid of the leftover trove? Or do you head in an entirely different direction, disavow candy altogether, and offer trick-or-treaters those unappealing “healthy snacks” that nagging health authorities have been trying to get us to hand out for years, on the theory that while the kids clearly won’t like them, at least they won’t tempt you, either?
Welcome to the remote work world.
There are two crucial decision points for the Halloween candy shopper — type of candy, and volume. Here’s a good rule of thumb on candies to avoid if you want your house to be respected in the ‘hood: don’t buy anything that appeared at the office coffee station the morning after Beggars’ Night last year. That means, in short, that you shouldn’t buy Jolly Ranchers, SweeTarts, or any kind of “healthy candy.” I also think suckers should be avoided, but that is primarily because our grandmother often terrorized UJ and me with “cautionary” stories about awful disasters that could befall innocent children. One of the stories was about a sweet-faced child who was running with a sucker in her mouth, tripped, fell face first, and had the white sucker stem smash through the roof of her mouth and impale her brain. I’m pretty sure Grandma used the phrase “doctors say she was dead as soon as she hit the floor” in recounting this horrible tale. (You’ve been warned!)
The volume aspect of the candy purchase decision often is ignored by over-confident souls who believe they can buy a bag of “fun-sized” Snickers, Milky Way, and Three Musketeers bars and be done with it. The volume issue poses its own hazards, however. Any house that runs out of candy and turns out the porch lights at mid-point on Beggars’ Night is by definition a loser house. So, you don’t want to run out — but at the same time you don’t want to be sitting in your house come 8 p.m. listening to the siren’s song of irresistible Reese’s Cups. At our house, we typically experience peaks and valleys in candy distribution. We start with full bowls and boldly encourage the early arriving kids to take multiple pieces, then panic after the early rush and turn into misers who harangue kids who try to sneak an extra piece — but then by the end of the night we’re basically hurling candy out the door at any random passing kid in order to get rid of the stuff.
Webner House 