I grew up jealous of the kids at St. Olaf (college in Northfield, MN) because they had this great cafeteria. So my dream job was to teach there and eat with the students.
Well, half a dream is better than none. I’m teaching at a tech college… but I’m eating in the cafeteria with my students. And, bonus: the salad bar is cheap and stocked with salad/veggie/relish-y experiments from the culinary students.
Only down side is that every semester, you have a different schedule. So my “lunch hour” right now is 2:30-5:30. Plenty of time, but then I have an evening class til 8:30.
I’m a substitute teacher, which means that who I eat lunch with varies from day to day, based both on what school I’m in, and what time I have lunch. Sometimes the break room is packed, while sometimes it’s just me. Some of the other teachers I know fairly well, others not so much. There’s usually conversation going on, often relating to students (of which I also know some better than others).
I stay at my desk, but I minimize my work windows and do a little surfing. Normally, I take an hour, but if I need to leave early, I’ll just take 30 minutes. On very rare occasions, I’ll run an errand at lunch, and in the 2 years I’ve been on this job, I think I’ve gone out to lunch twice.
That was always annoying. Surrounded by office buildings and so few restaurants realize there are people working in them at night? I used to trudge across the river to Olgivie station (past that guy playing the paint cans), and even there almost everyone was closing up when our 8 p.m. lunch break started.
These days, at noon I take my wife to the YMCA where we get our workouts in. Then I get home and she makes me a quick lunch, often eaten while on conference calls (on mute) or simply surfing until I finish eating.
A couple of days I teach up in a town about 25 minutes away and have morning classes and then a break for a while and afternoon classes later. Sometime I hit the gym during that slot. I’m at my house on other days so I either warm up something or go to someplace close. The only difference is if I then surf on the computer or my phone.
Head down one floor at around 11:50 and get lunch (provided by company. Hot lunch MWR, sandwiches (and often soup) TF). It is decent but I’m not picky.
I head back to my desk and listen to a board game video while I play some turn based online games. I’ll check the dope and boardgamegeek and sometimes other stuff)
At 12:25 or so I will return my plate and utensils. I wash my salad bowl (I bring my own) and one last check of home email
I work for county government. We are the GIS office and handle addressing for about 30,000 residents. Along with every other odd question that might arise that has anything to do with mapping and such. There are 4 of us in the office.
I work from 7-3:30. I have a small refrigerator in my office to keep lunch in. I eat at 11am or there about. And eat at my desk. We keep the office open for any walk in traffic to answer questions and help with computer/GIS stuff. I also eat breakfast at my desk. Instant oatmeal with milk and I throw some fruit in it. Works fine for me. The other 3 on our staff eat later. But often eat at their desks and or leave for an hour to run errands or go for a walk or whatever.
If there are special circumstances like a car in the shop or one of us needs a ride for some reason, we just work with it. No big deal. We are all pretty well cross trained so that we can handle any odd walk in that needs information. We try not to have 3 of us on vacation at a time leaving one person alone.
I almost always bring my own lunch, usually either soup or leftover dinner from the night before. My cooking is better than most of what I can buy at a reasonable price near work, and is certainly higher in veggies and lower in salt. Then I sit in the lunchroom (never at my desk; I never get a moment’s peace there, plus I want to eat with real dishes and utensils, which we have in the lunchroom).
Usually I end up reading on my iPad (Facebook, personal email, the Dope, NYT, etc.) but if any of the coworkers I am friendly with stop in, I might chat a bit. When I’m done eating, I usually have some time left, and might take a bit of a walk or run an errand or so (Target is near my office).
I work from home, so my lunch break is usually spent washing dishes while food cooks, then I eat while I work. Sometimes I’ll take an actual break and screw around online while I eat.
I do a lot of cocaine, which precludes eating altogether, and is also a great conversation tool…if I could remember what we talked about, man! I could write a Michael Moore novel someday.
Depends on the job, I’m a consultant so I switch often.
The last one, I’d either bring something to heat or order a half-sandwich from the company cafeteria in our factory down the hill (barre bread: a half is a foot-long, handspan-wide sub). I usually ate at the break room for two reasons: to get some blood back into my legs and because nobody else did.
Previous one, we took a coffee break at 10 (don’t let it be 10:30 or the hordes descend), usually in the company café and had a mini-sandwich (handspan-long, two-fingers wide) and a glass of freshly-squeezed OJ or of the day’s juice. I had to learn to ask if the day’s juice had cucumber because I can’t stand it and for some reason the cooks didn’t feel the need to list it. Lunch, I usually ate on my own because the places my coworkers went to were “heavy worker daily menu”, just the first dish was more calories and fat than I needed and a lot of them didn’t even offer half-menus.
Before that one, we were supposed to have 2h for lunch. You take 2h for lunch, when the only places to eat are the big lunchroom or the industrial area’s restaurant? The people from Madrid (HR manager and a handful of other Management folks) all went to the restaurant and took their two hours; the rest of the company brought lunch from home, ate at the break room and traded recipes. It was one of the sources of tension in the company: the madrileños refused to acknowledge that people weren’t taking the full break, neither the locals nor the people from Elsewhere wanted the full break. In general that location had a lot of problems with the madrileños thinking that “what’s good in Madrid is good in the whole world” and the rest of the world wanting other arrangements.
I work in a close-knit team of about a half-dozen people. On my lunch hour I like to go off and be by myself. There’s an onsite gym which I use nearly every day. It’s such a terrible gym that I’m nearly always the only one in there which, somewhat ironically, makes it by far the best gym I’ve ever joined
I share an office with my technician. It’s a routine: at around 11 AM we both begin to eat lunch at our desk. A few minutes later, Mike (one of the government guys) comes in at eats lunch with us. Mike is a nice guy, but is also a hypochondriac. So we get to hear all about his latest (imaginary) medical problems. At around 11:30 I go out running or hit the gym. Lather, rinse, repeat.
10:00AM “break”? 2 hour lunches that pisses off employers when you don’t take full advantage of the time? When does America get onboard with this? I want to live on manana time, dammit!
I take lunch whenever I want and for how long I want as long as everything is working fine. Some days that means no lunch at all and others it can mean 2+ hours. There aren’t a lot of places to eat or go near work so I perfected “the art of the cruise” where I just drive around and listen to music. I also have a full assortment of recreational gear including the world’s most comfortable lounge chair, a fishing pole and an inflatable boat in the back of my SUV. Those don’t do me much good during the winter but they are great for nearby lake beaches during the summer.
Lately, I have been going on dates during lunch. I work 30 miles away from home but my newest girlfriend lives close to work so we do whatever we want during that time.
oh, of course there are the idiots who send an Outlook meeting notice in the morning, “inviting” people to a meeting that day at 11:30 a.m. or 12:00 p.m.
whoever first uttered the words “working lunch” should be caned.
