There are often people in the kitchen at work microwaving their SmartFoods or NutriFast, and everyone has to wait to use the microwave, and there’s a line by the coffee/hot water machine, and everyone’s fighting over the newspaper, etc. This is typical, which is part of why I purposely try to avoid the break room between 11:30 and 1:00, but some days I get hungry. And that’s when I notice people seemingly making dinner for entire villages in the microwave, and I think it’s kind of dicky.
First, I didn’t realize that these microwavable lunches took so long to make. There are instructions involved - you have to microwave for 10 minutes, turn over, re-microwave, let cool, baste, put back in the microwave for exactly 2.166666667 minutes, and then let cool on a window sill for 5 minutes before giving it one last 30 second microwave blast. I thought the whole point of buying these food abominations was because they were convenient, if nothing else.
Second, excuse me, but would you mind putting off baking your beef wellington for 60 seconds, the amount of time it takes the rest of us to reheat our leftovers from last night?
Is there break room etiquette? Are these people jerks? Am I a jerk for not appreciating the apparent first-come-first-serve rule of break rooms? If, for example, I’m going to fill out my .75litre water bottle, and I see someone standing around with a mug, I’ll let that person go first because our cold water machine is a joke, and dispenses water one trickle at a time. Nobody wants to wait around for me to fill up my giant canteen when a mug can be filled relatively quickly.
The problem is that you don’t have enough microwaves. I blame management. I’m not sure there’s anything you can say to them. They need to warm their lunch just like everyone else.
Light some torches and grab the pitchforks and storm into the boss’s office with a list of demands.
Back in *my *day it used to take all day to bake a potato, and that’s the way we liked it!
But seriously folks, I’m on your side to a certain extent, MOL. Break rooms generally only come with a couple microwaves and it’s not very considerate to hog them to cook a meal. Then again, you have to cook them somehow, you know.
It would be nice if the microwavers cleaned up the bubbly goo that spilled over, too.
I don’t get too worked up over this kind of thing. It’s certainly not the same level of dickery as, say, cutting people off in traffic, or having your dog drop a deuce on the middle of a busy sidewalk. It’s more like not letting the person at the grocery store who’s buying AA batteries and Fanta go ahead of you, while you shuffle through your three kids and six weeks’ worth of food. Come on now.
First come, first served has been the law of every break room I’ve ever had access to. After that, it’s grocery store line etiquette: ask politely, “do you mind if I go ahead of you, mine only takes 30 seconds.” But once someone’s food is in the microwave, it’s their turn.
I agree that it’s pretty unrealistic to expect to be able to use the microwave for more than, say 5 minutes. It’s the same theory behind not bringing in a week’s worth of lunches to store in the fridge…if everyone did it, there would not be enough room (or enough time for everyone to eat lunch). It’s not management’s fault, really, and they detest getting into these sorts of petty squabbles.
If you want to make your point, bring in a frozen roaster chicken some day and spend 30 minutes to an hour thawing and cooking it in the microwave…see if that doesn’t draw some ire, and get the message across.
Your other option is just to bring stuff that doesn’t need reheating.
I think of it like gym etiquette - if you’re at the machine first go ahead and use it, however if you know that you’re going to take a comparatively long time, or if you notice a line of folks waiting to use it, try letting people work in.
And clean up after yourself. For a while we had someone cooking the world’s stinkiest fish for lunch; there was a whole section of hallway near the kitchen area that absolutely reeked - not a little odor, but the kind of sulphurous stink that made people squinch their face and hold their breath until they could get far away from it (not an exaggeration). If your meal spatters all over the inside of the microwave take a few seconds with a paper towel to get rid of the mess, etc.
I don’t think it’s the fault of the fish person that you don’t like the smell of fish. Personally I appreciate the often pungent smell of fish or curry and the like. Hey, it’s his lunch and he’s entitled to it.
These people need to learn that instructions on microwave food are nonsense. Just heat it on full until it’s hot. ‘Let it stand’ can be replaced with ‘eat the fucking thing’.
I’m with Leaffan on food smells, though. Why should we pretend that food is odourless?
Some workplaces have rules against cooking fish in the microwave. Few things smell as bad as secondhand fish (except for burnt popcorn–that makes me sick). I try not to bring in food that’s really smelly, because I know my coworkers don’t want to have to smell it all afternoon.
That’s a very slippery slope regarding what smells good or bad isn’t it? Who made you or your coworkers the official food sniffers of the planet? Believe it or not a lot of cultures eat fish daily and the smell to them is perfectly fine. Perhaps your hamburger or pork tenderloin is offencive to them? Besides it’s edible food we’re talking about, not feces on a stick or rancid maggot beef. Get over it.
We also have a “scentsitivity” policy (yes, an actual policy by that name) posted on all floors (amusingly, the poster on my floor is three feet from the microwave) reminding people that some folks are allergic to some strong odors. This fish smell was not the mild smell of fried fish - this was full on nasty ass stinky fish reek. Think fish that has been sitting on the hot parking lot for a few days. We’re not talking about one or two people having an issue, this was every single person who walked by getting That Look on their face…think of that scene in “GoodFellas” where Ray Liotta has to help exhume a ripe mob boss they’d buried weeks earlier. It would take a good hour for the kitchen area to become usable - nobody would sit there until it vented. The microwave would have to sit open for an extended time because otherwise anything cooked in it would acquire that smell and be non-potable.
Given that it’s a busy work environment with lots of people, my feeling on the etiquette of it would be “Please be considerate of your co-workers”. If there’s a dish I happen to like but the smell makes other people gag, I can enjoy it at home. I do not NEED to make it at work.
Umm, ya but who made you or your coworkers the sniff experts? I have worked with lots of Viet Namese, Chinese, Korean and other workers who have every right to warm their lunch dishes. These folks like seafood and who are you to discriminate against them because your olfactory senses are impinged upon. Like I said, get over it. It’s only a smell, a smell from a perfectly edible food source. Grow up.
At our workplace it seems that food gets left in the fridge for weeks and starts to smell like a whale carcass. There used to be someone who tossed everything out on Friday afternoons, good or spoiled didn’t matter. I think no one cares anymore.
Nothing. It’s not a question of expertise. It’s a simple fact that there was someone who was cooking something with an extraordinarily powerful odor that was considered nasty by the vast majority of people who got near it (down the hall, in our offices around the corner, etc). It made a noticeable portion of our floor unpleasant to be on for a while, including the area where other people were trying to prepare their food - and in fact said odor would get into other things that were reheated in the same microwave; I don’t think the lady reheating her lasagna wanted it to come out tasting like that. I have no idea whether anyone complained to anyone to have anything done about this issue and if so what if any action would have been taken, but the question was about etiquette and I think it’s poor etiquette to make a common kitchen unpleasant for everyone else. We’re not talking about a point of law or government intrusion on personal liberties or whether someone can cook up a nice durian & limberger souffle at home or in a public place. It’s a private workplace. I certainly grant that whoever was cooking the stuff up might not have known that it made everyone else feel ill and until such time as they become aware of that fact (or should reasonably have known it) it’s not “bad manners” on their part but once it’s known it’d be polite to leave it at home.
How about bathing? What if I decide that I’m not showering any more, I’ll just wash my face and hands and wear clean clothes but my BO starts to build up and it gets to the point where, although I’m not causing a physical danger to anyone, I’m rank. I stink. It’s unpleasant to be around. Is that bad workplace etiquette? Bad manners? If folks complain about it would anyone be surprised if my boss or HR takes me aside and says that maybe I ought to invest in a few bars of Dial and a bottle of shampoo?
If my personal behavior is negatively impacting a lot of other people, that’s not good. Again, we’re not talking about one guy complaining that another guy’s tie color offends him, or somebody harping on the lady with a glandular problem that causes her to sweat a lot, or the office vegan throwing a fit because he thinks that every bag of McDonald’s smells like a putrefying corpse.
Your right to cook stinky fish ends where my nostrils begin.
