Hasn’t happened to me because I bring my lunch & snacks in a portable little cooler and park it underneath my desk.
But a co-worker often has had her milk stolen. She brings in a large carton at the beginning of the week so she can have milk with her cereal and to add to her morning coffee. She noticed that the carton gets lighter in weight earlier than it should. Sure enough, other people had been helping themselves to it without asking her if it was okay. Once she even caught the big boss stealing some of the milk. Boss sheepishly said she was going to ask her later if it was okay. So we take the milk first, THEN ask permission? What’s up with that?
After a polite e-mail about it, the pilfering stopped, but it didn’t take long for it to start up again.
Then someone had his leftover pizza stolen that he was planning to eat the next day.
A friend of mine’s office had a coworker who kept taking people’s lunches from the community refrigerator. He never admitted it, but everyone knew. He was eventually fired b/c of it, and guess what he did on the way out? You got it, took someone’s lunch.
yes… at my office… you can not put anything in the fridge… it is horrible… there is this woman there that eats all day… it is disgusting…
even if you write your name on something… she eats it…
she has been a little better since the management had to tell her not to do that…
but I still do not bring anything in… and some people bought there own mini-fridge…
When we have an office party or something… she is always first in line… she loads her play with as much as she can… and then she is first back for seconds…
Seriously… in an office of 80 people or so… we order some pizza… and she is done with 3 slices while other people haven’t had any… what a PIG
I was in a shop that had this problem. Till a roast beef sandwich with a generous dash of habenero pepper was taken. About 10 minutes before lunch one day the suspect was seen leaving a rest room and running to a drinking fountain. He spent several minutes trying to get the burning sensation out of his mouth. Once we knew who it was, he was watched very carefully, especially just before lunch break.
Lunch weasels.
We caught one at work with a trap sandwich. Ham, cheese, mustard, lettuce, and an extra ingredient. A wad of hair hidden in the middle.
Cruel? Perhaps.
We had a guy who would not only eat the desserts out of everyones ‘brought from home lunch’ but also had the excruciatingly annoying habit of staring at your plate while you were eating, saying “Hey ! You gonna eat that? Oh? What about that? Can I have your roll? Can I have your pickle?”
What I mostly wanted to give him was a knuckle sandwich. Bleah.
After reading this thread I went and searched for another thread I remember as “the breakroom pig” thread. Tried all sorts of search combinations but no luck. That was a good one, so if anyone else finds it I hope you would post a link here.
On the bright side I’ve taken to buying the 24 packs of coke cans from the supermarket and bringing them to work as its cheaper than buying them from the lunch shop. It works out at about 50c a can, each time my boss takes one he gives me $2 because thats what he pays at the shop. Now I’m making a profit!
It’s not just food that gets stolen from our staff lounge. We had a knife block complete with a set of knives. One by one the knives disappeared. Why the heck didn’t they take the flippin’ block, too?!
Then some of our plates and flatware disappeared from the kitchen cabinet and drawer.
And my co-worker whose milk was stolen used to keep her locker unlocked with the key sticking out of the lock (yeah, I know it’s not a smart thing to do; she was only one who did that), but after she noticed several sanitary pads missing from her locker, she decided to make it a practice to always lock her locker. She only kept stuff like her toothbrush, toothpaste and feminine protection items in there.
I suspected it was the evening female security guard who was stealing our stuff and the sanitary pads, but I had no proof. She quit over a year ago, thank goodness. And wouldn’t you know it? The stealing of kitchen utensils stopped after she left.
I had many a frozen dinner go missing from my workplace. I don’t put up with sh*t like that. You just don’t mess with a pothead’s munchies.
Of course since we’re a peaceful lot, my solution to the problem (even though I was pretty damn sure who it was) was to tape a note to the inside of the freezer that said “PLEASE STOP eating my frozen dinners!” and sign it. It seemed to work.
One coworker came to me later and stated that the refrigerator was like some sort of communal property to him. You put in whatever you want and take out whatever you want. Of course, that kind of hippie spirit is easy to muster up when you buy nothing but generic, 10-for-a-dollar bean burritos while I’m putting in $2-4 frozen dinners. :rolleyes:
I had stocked up with a week’s worth of frozen dinners, and the next day they were all gone. I checked around a little bit. One of my cow-orkers had gone to the grocery store over lunch the day before and bought some stuff to take home that evening, but it had to be kept frozen in the meantime. When he was getting ready to leave that night, he took it out of the freezer, then got distracted by a phone call or something, and wound up leaving it out overnight. When he got in the next morning, he figured it was ruined so he threw it away.
You guessed it, he grabbed the wrong stack out of the freezer.
I don’t know if anyone steals from our fridge, but I do know it rarely gets cleaned and right now it smells disgusting. I usually bring my lunch in my own small cooler, but earlier this week, I didn’t bring lunch - just a bottle of water. I opened the fridge to put my water in there and was almost knocked down by the stink.
I use to work with a woman who not only took your food out of the frig, but even asked me once what I had in my grocery bag. When I told her “MY food,” she got very upset “What’s wrong if I take a few crackers out of your bag.” Cause it’s my food, you bleeding idiot.
Bet it would have royally pissed her off if (before she retired) you helped yourself to some of HER food and did it right in front of her.
Then you could have just said to her, ‘What’s wrong if I just nibble on some your food?’ in all innocence, ‘after all, you’ve been helping yourself to mine all this time.’
Oh, I recommended to my friend whose milk was often stolen that she wait until the big boss and whoever else she suspected were culprits were there in the kitchen, then do this in full view of them: take out the carton of milk and drink DIRECTLY OUT OF IT. The big boss is paranoid of germs and getting sick. She took my advice. I think it worked.
