Where do all the office teaspoons go?
The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute
Epidemiologists secretly numbered 70 office teaspoons and watched most of them vanish within five months.
Fed up with never finding a teaspoon, researchers at a Melbourne institute discreetly numbered 70 of them, placed them in the staff tearooms and checked on them every week for five months.
By the end, 56 of the 70 had disappeared. The teaspoon half-life was 81 days, and spoons in shared communal tearooms vanished almost twice as fast as those in rooms belonging to one team. Somewhere, there is a drawer full of very well-travelled spoons.
If you want to keep a teaspoon, give it a team to belong to.