So I bring in a pita stuffed with healthful things like spinach (it’s back on the shelves, woot!), wrapped securely in plastic wrap and then shut tight inside a Gladware square container. No way that thing was coming apart. I put it in the fridge on Monday and don’t get to it. I don’t take a lunch Tuesday knowing it is there waiting patiently for me. I eat other healthful snacks Tuesday since I have a meeting in the evening and the pita will hit the spot for dinner. I go looking for it, and it’s not in the bag with my drink and snacks. OK, sometimes things get shifted around. After an exhaustive search of the fridge I find my pita shoved in the back. The Gladware is securely shut but when I open it, the plastic wrap is half-opened, the pita mangled and what could be a bite taken out of the side.
What the heck? Ok, if you have someone else pack your lunch and you made a mistake, I understand. But fess up or at least toss the item you frigging bit into!
And while you’re at it, hands off my Coffeemate. I shouldn’t have to mark the bottle the way I do to see if anyone has helped themself.
We’ve had a few rants here on this subject in the past. It never ceases to amaze me what liberties people will take with items that don’t belong to them.
If you’d like some revenge put a note on the fridge to the effect that you had a pita with some recalled spinach on it that you meant to throw away but it appears someone took a bite out of it and perhaps that person should see a doctor ASAP.
I wonder why locking lunchboxes aren’t more popular?
This is why I use one of those lunch bag thingies that has room to hold a plastic “blue ice” cooling source. No one’s likely to get under my desk and steal my meat loaf sandwich.
Some people see food as a community item, though God knows why. I once worked with a lady who would casually poke her fork into friends’ food and take a bite and would take whatever sounded good from the lunchroom fridge. “Ooh! Lasagna!” It’s as if she saw a lunch room as a pot-luck.
She looked genuinely puzzled the time a co-worker snarled at her for taking a spoonful of his dessert. I imagine that at her house, the family eats from a common trough.
Man, I take my food seriously. I would go nuclear if I saw someone doing that. I would go apeshit if I went to get my food and it was gone or molested. I would systematically physically eliminate suspects until they were no more, or until the perpetrator confessed, and then I would do unspeakable things to them before my rage finally subsided in a personal orgy of blood drinking.
Or I might settle for slapping them really, really, hard.
My wife works in small office with maybe 5-6 people and one of them is a food stealer! She has had someone eat her yogurts and other foods. She has confronted them while they were all sitting in the lunch room “Hey, I’m sure it was a mistake but did someone take my yogurt?” and no one would fess up. This is a chronic prblem. Someone is always losing their food.
I just don’t get it. You know what you brought in! Everything else is off limits unless it is specifically brought in for everyone such as donuts or something like that.
I had the opposite problem once. When I lived in a dorm, a third roommate who worked in a dairy, got some free cartons of ice and decided to surprise us, his two other roommates. So we each got a carton of yummy ice on our shelf in the freezer. But he never got around to telling us of his surprise.
For a week or so, both my roommate and I, increasingly annoyed, shoved the two cartons of icecream back and forth to each others parts in the freezer. " Keep your stuff out of my freezerspace" we both thought.
And some people know they’re doing wrong, but they do it anyhow. Place I used to work, we had a guy who did forensic tech work who had been relegated to the night shift. No autopsies on the night shift, just watch the place, clean it up, handle the funeral homes as they go in and out with the bodies. He was not exactly insane but definitely really weird, one of those guys you feel sorry for with the slightly sick feeling. Like, isn’t it good he’s on work-release, wonder when he’ll have to go back to the institution.
He was utterly reliable about showing up for work at an hour when it’s hard to get utterly reliable people on a salary about the size of half a peanut, so they kept him on. He was also an inveterate food-stealer. One of our day techs thought she’d fix him. She took her two pieces of pizza and she wrapped them in a cardboard box and put it in a plastic bag and put that in another box and sealed it with duct tape backwards and forwards. Into the fridge.
The next morning, pizza was gone. Box was violated. He said he didn’t do it. Like hell he didn’t do it. He knew and he knew we knew. He may have been teetering on the edge, but he knew that pizza wasn’t for him. He knew that duct tape was to keep him out. He still did it.
A few years ago a coworker and I decided to split a pizza for lunch. I ordered it and right before it arrived, received a phone call I couldn’t get off of for a while. Coworker went into the kitchen- right across from my office- with the pizza and ate his half, then returned to his office.
When my call ended twenty minutes later, I entered the kitchen to see a woman I didn’t know very well in the middle of the last slice from the box. I stood there dumbfounded, looking at her and the empty box.
“Was this your pizza?” she asked.
“Um, yeah.”
“Oh- well when I came in here, the pizza was here and the room was empty, so I figured it was up for grabs.”
“Did you order it?” says I.
“No”
“Did you ask anyone if you could have some?”
“No”
“That was going to be my lunch.”
“Oh”
That was her entire response- Oh. No apology, no offer to pay me for it, nothing. Although, she did ask me if I wanted her salad.
So, she did bring in her own lunch, but decided mine was better, so she ate it instead.
Why do people think that as long as there’s nobody here guarding this food, they can rightfully claim it as theirs?
Yup. As an adminstrative professional, it is up to me to at times order lunches for visiting dignitaries, luminaries and engineer types who are having meetings in my conference room. I’ll order up a really nice brunch buffet, and it gets put on tables outside my big, only for important people meetings, conference room. Usually, there’s enough for, oh, 20 or so at minimum. I’ll get these mouthbreathers come in here, who aren’t even related to the meeting, and think they can start sampling off this buffet! When it’s OBVIOUS that they are not leftovers. I send out an email to everyone when there is leftovers - saying that they are here and free for the taking. That’s how it’s always been and always will be. Nothing has changed in years, yet they persist on coming over looking for food. And if I’m not at my desk, they’ll TAKE IT!!! GRRRRRR.
Different offices, different rules. Food left out in the kitchens of the offices I work in is food up for grabs (this doesn’t include food in the fridge). However, the kitchens are not eating areas, so I don’t know if that makes a difference.
Maybe not the best excuse but you did leave the sandwich in there a few days, if the bite taken out of it did not occur the first day you put it in the fridge maybe the person thought it was abandoned property.
Well, sorry you lost your lunch, but I do think pizza falls into that category with donuts and baglels - you know, if you see a box of this sitting out in the common area, safe to assume it’s for the taking.
I know I’ve posted this story here before, but I love it so I will tell it again.
I had a frozen calzone stolen from the work fridge at an old job. Determining the thief wasn’t dificult as it was over the weekend and only 2 people had access to this fridge.
I asked the thief if he had eaten my calzone and he admitted it, so I told him he was going to have to pay me back, which he agreed to. I said " That will be 20 bucks then".
He thought that was outrageous but I said “Look, I had to go to the store and buy that calzone and bring it here, then on Sunday I find out my lunch is gone, so I had to buy a different lunch out of the damned vending machines that I hate, so you are paying for the lunch you ate, the crappy lunch I had to eat, and a fine for being a jackass that eats people’s lunches”
Maybe it’s the season? When I left work on Tuesday, I had 4 bottles of pop left in a six-pack. I did a bit of grocery shopping that night and deliberately didn’t buy any because I had plenty left, or so I thought. On Wednesday morning, I had 1 left. Razzin’ frazzin’ lunch thieves!
But it was secured and inside my lunch bag. Did someone really take inventory on Monday for the purposes of taking something Tuesday? And if so, eat the whole thing (I just might chalk its complete absence up to my faulty brain) and don’t leave a mangled sandwich for me to find.
