Teamwork, Communication and Rotten Meat

Tonight my roommate and I, who have both taught, individually and together, numerous classes on teamwork and communication, learned a valuable lesson in both of those topics.

Monday night, Clif called asking me to pull out some chicken breast and hamburger meat to defrost so he could make dinner later that night. Being a good roommate, I put the chicken breast in the sink with some warm water and the hamburger patties in the microwave on a plate. Unfortunately, I didn't tell him where exactly I had put the hamburger. So when he didn't see it out with the chicken, he assumed I had forgotten to pull it and got some from the freezer. When I got home he was cooking up hamburger meat so, naturally, I assumed that he had found it.

The next night, we starting smelling a progressively terrible odor in the kitchen (and lately even in the living room). We thought it must have been the garbage disposal, since we didn't have perishable foods in any of the cabinets. Running the garbage disposal with soap didn't seem to help and the candles we lit only masked the odor. I finally became determined on Wednesday night to find the problem. I smelled my way around the kitchen, ruling out all of the cabinets, the sink, the refrigerator and even the stove, before I came to the microwave. When I opened it, what did I find but my conscientiously placed hamburger patties, which had by now thawed out...and begun molding quite extensively. The smell was truly putrid. When I managed to peel the rotting patties off the plate into the trash, the appearance and smell almost made throw up.

So what went wrong here and led to this most disgusting conclusion? It was a complete breakdown of apartment communication. We both made assumptions about the others' actions and because he never called me out on forgetting to grab the meat and I neither communicated to him my actions nor followed up with him, we both had different ideas of where the meat was, that is, neither of us thought it was in the microwave. Therefore, we didn't even think to check there when we started to smell something rotten.

The only good that came from this whole ordeal is a good real world example of the very rotten consequences when teams don't communicate properly. I'm sure we'll remember this story when we next teach one of those classes.