You’ve seen the bowls filled with self-serve candies. They frequent all sorts of offices and workplaces around the country.

The Collegian has one.

Unlike most candy bowls, the one here isn’t made of frosted, textured glass, opting instead for red, dollar-store plastic. Unlike the candies that usually fill them, these aren’t inedible.

This bowl doesn’t have candy corn carbon-dated back to the first Halloween, or the sticky strawberry-flavored candies made to look like dome-shaped fruit, or stale M&Ms somehow melted together into one big pile or homemade taffy wrapped in wax paper.

It’s the good stuff, and it’s on co-sports editor Kim Anderson’s desk.

She has a grab bag of individually wrapped snack size candy bars. Most of the ones in her bowl are Snickers. At the expense that I might sound like I’m on the Mars Bar payroll, I love Snickers.

I snagged one. Hungry, having not had breakfast that day, I practically inhaled it.

“Just one more,” I told myself, as I reached around the ever-on-task Kim. I don’t think she would have noticed if I hadn’t reached between her and her phone cord in my haste to get to the bowl.

Dodging her sideways glare, I grabbed another.

“I don’t mind you having a few,” she said, looking at me in a way that said she minded if I had a few. “Just don’t take all of them.”

Feeling a little guilty, I put it back in the bowl. Really, I tossed it over her head, where it hit her monitor and rebounded onto the desk beside the bowl.

“Not after you’ve touched it,” she said, raising her voice just a little. “Just take it.”

I put up some show of shock and disdain. And then I take the still-sealed candy back. I eat it, a little slower this time. I think I even remembered to take off the wrapper.

I avoid even looking in the direction of the bowl until half an hour later, when she leaves for whatever reason. I happen to glance back, and I see it, beckoning me.

Hastily, so nobody else around notices, I grab just one more, carefully peeling off the wrapper in such a way that it doesn’t draw attention. I look around, making sure nobody sees my last deceit.

Opening up the wrapper, I put the chocolate goodness in my mouth, prepared to savor it for some time.

But something’s wrong. No peanuts. No caramel. Just fluffy, inconsequential, greyish filling.

I look down at the wrapper, and know terror for the first time in my life.

3 Musketeers.

Last time I steal from her bowl.