Treats. Yum.

There are always treats around in the office, apparently on the theory that everything goes better with chocolate. An eminently reasonable theory, that. (Understand, of course, that the treats are brought in by the peons, and aren’t provided by BigLawFirm, because that would be treating us like, you know, people.)

Today, someone brought in what looked like a big Zip-lok bag of strawberries. Cool! Big, juicy strawberries in the middle of winter! A better treat than the bag of Hershey’s Kisses I usually bring in. Until you got closer, and saw that they looked like a big bag of big, juicy strawberries that had been individually frozen and thawed. And then frozen and thawed, and frozen and now halfway-thawed. Well, okay, they could still be tasty, but I’m not going to try one just yet. I waited a couple of hours for someone else to try them.

Someone eventually did, and he didn’t run away or shriek, so I wandered over to get one. From up close, they looked even stranger and less appetizing. Rather as though someone took the thrice-frozen and -thawed berries, sprayed them with a thin icing, and put red sparkles on them. I took one anyway. Very odd texture, to match. Some give with no rebound, when you squeeze on it, but not as much give as you’d expect from gently squeezing room-temperature thawed strawberries. Roughly comparable to squeezing a dried hairball that my cat had produced and hidden in an out-of-the-way corner. And that probably should have been a clue to me.

I bit into it. Yuck. Yuck. El yuck-o. These things turn out to be mock strawberries, made of coconut flakes, sugar, red food coloring, artificial strawberry flavoring, and red sugar sparkles. And maybe mashed potato flakes. Really disgusting. I believe that we were the ones being mocked, not strawberries. I think they’d be disgusting even to someone who doesn’t think that flaked coconut has the flavor and texture of tiny pieces of waxed paper, but I didn’t need to hear anyone else’s opinion to form my own. And I cannot imagine why anyone would ever make them, except to play a mean prank.

And you know? No one ever went back for a second mock strawberry.