Our office is moving. This is an engineering and logistics feat on par with the construction of the pyramids, or building an aircraft carrier. Everything must be tagged, labeled, boxed, and certified. And, because this is China, chopped. The actual portage will be done over the holidays by paid help and not (thank god) by overworked PR consultants. Having previously suckered many of his own, less cautious friends into helping with house moves, Imagethief is extremely wary of the "help me move and I'll buy ya pizza" ploy. No pizza is worth an inguinal hernia. Trust me on that.

Our new digs are in the swank but alarmingly low-ceilinged Oriental Plaza complex at the intersection of Wangfujing and Chang'an Jie. I have mixed feelings about the move. On the one hand, my commute will quintuple from a Beijing-friendly one subway stop to five, my clients will be further away, I'll leave Starbucks behind, and I'll be alarmingly close to the seat of government at the Great Hall of the People. On the other hand, I'll gain an all-new assortment of mall food to choose from, a totally identical Starbucks with a totally identical staff, a fresh array of expensive, Ukrainian hookers in the hotel bar at the adjacent Grand Hyatt, and a movie theater in the basement.

One of my ex-colleagues, a patrician Dongbei woman of refined tastes, was more final in her evaluation of moving to Oriental Plaza. "Too many tourists there," she sniffed. "It's not a real office. Just a mall." From a woman with a conspicuous shopping jones and a taste for seventy kuai martinis, that was pretty harsh. I think this may be why she left the company. Or maybe she was tired of sitting next to me.

Speaking of mall food, the charms of a fresh assortment of restaurants below will be mostly lost on me. I generally bring my home-cooked lunches to work as I am only able to tolerate Taiwanese noodles and Schlotzky's very, very rarely. I do however, rely upon the ready supply of cheap, plastic forks and spoons provided by the office. These are of the lowest possible quality --they may be made from gravel-- and we get them for about one fen per gross. Over the past year Imagethief has probably swallowed a good half-kilo of plastic fork tines. When my next X-ray is taken the doctor will think I have swallowed a hedgehog, and I'll probably get sent to the psycho ward, or wherever they put people who eat suburban English wildlife.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase Don "Big Balls" Rumsfeld, you have to eat with the fork you have, not the fork you want. However, today, after putting my lovely, homemade pasta Bolognese into the microwave to reheat, I was alarmed to discover that our office ahyi had already packed up all the goddamn forks. And the spoons and chopsticks and everything else. A brief search of the office revealed that she was nowhere to be found, having already jaunted off for her own, fully untinseled lunch. Further searching revealed five packed and sealed boxes labeled "Ahyi" in the corner of the pantry. Promising.

With my pasta slowly congealing on the pantry table I sprinted back to my desk for a pair of scissors and, because I am courteous, a roll of tape to reseal the boxes. I cut open and searched all five. They contained every pantry item except forks. By this time I had a thumping headache and a pain in my right shoulder from hurling thirty kilo boxes of porcelain and beverages around.

To my eternal shame, I was reduced to surreptitiously rummaging in the pantry wastebasket for discarded utensils. I haven't dumpster-dived since I accidentally threw my retainer out in one of the enormous trash bins in the cafeteria of Emerson Junior-High School in Los Angeles. (To this day, that may be the most humiliating experience of my life, or possibly number two after US airport security. But I did find my retainer.) Fortunately none of my colleagues stumbled upon me rooting in the bin like some kind of necktie-wearing bag lady. And I did find a single, forlorn spoon wrapped in the toilet paper that passes for napkins in our office pantry. One rinse in boiling water from the 开水器 later and I at least had one utensil.

But I still wanted a fork. While I ate salad with a plastic spoon, which is really quite difficult, I jealously watched the one other girl in the pantry eating her lunch with a fork, hoping that she might bin it on her way out. No such luck though. When she was done she conscientiously dropped it into her plastic container for washing and re-use, before giving me a cheery smile and a casual flip of her ponytail on the way out. Selfish bitch.

As I dread a future where the entire surface of the planet is covered in discarded, plastic cutlery, I normally save and re-use my pantry forks and spoons, at least the ones that haven't broken or shed tines into my food. In fact, I have rather a collection of them piling up at home, which annoys my wife. But with the move coming I've been more cavalier, taking a devil-may-care attitude towards my cutlery and wantonly discarding it after every meal.

If only I had known the cruel fait that awaited me. Thank god there were at least paper cups, or I would have been begging for plastic bottles at the tourist traps.