So I get in to work today and I find that somebody has raided my little fridge and taken my lunch! This was no accident. My office is out of the way, and you have to very deliberately go around a few corners to get there. You can’t go in there by mistake.
So this means some genetically misaligned crotch cannibal went into my office, opened my fridge, and helped himself to my sandwich and Snapple.
Do they take the expensive PDA? No. Desktop computer? No. Just my lunch.
I’d rather they had taken the expensive stuff. It would have been less personal. But taking a man’s lunch is low.
It sure is. In fact, it’s more or less insane. If the thief had gotten caught, he might have been fired for it. What sane person would risk losing his job just for the sake of a swiped lunch? (cue Twilight Zone theme.)
Put a jar of mayo near the heater, then use that to mix some tuna. Make a big yummy [sub]looking[/sub] sandwich with it, and wait for it to be stolen. Hide your real lunch under your desk or something. When the decoy sandwich vanishes, you can just look for the bastard puking his life away. Identification coupled with Instant Karma for the bad guy!
Then put a lock on your fridge, with a sign on front that says “Ha ha fucking ha.”
Damn, that sucks! I’ve had that happen to me before. I don’t know what you can do about it, though, except leave a sandwich with some cigarette butts in it for the next thieving bastard that comes along. Or booby-trap your fridge somehow. Hmm…
Someone stole my lunch from the fridge at work a couple of times, so I put a note up saying what I thought of them. I figured they should at least feel ashamed for what they had done.
But the thing that really pissed me off was that a got a number of responses to my note telling me to grow up and get over it, that it was just a lunch! WTF?!?! It seems that more than one person thought that it was OK to steal from a co-worker.
Put a note on the fridge informing people that your lunch in the fridge, contains fluids and/or solids that originated in your body. Feel free to steal and eat this at your own risk.
I wonder how they’d feel if it was their lunch that got eaten, or worse, as Grimace said, half-eaten and put back. Yuck.
(I can’t get over a half-eaten lunch being put back. I wonder if someone started eating, and then realized, “Hey, this isn’t my lunch!” and then put it back. Idiots.)
As for putting up a note, anyone who would steal a co-worker’s lunch probably isn’t going to be intimidated by a note. I like the idea of a rotten-egg salad sandwich or old tuna and some rancid milk out as a decoy.
I had a can of energy drink in my cubicle. “Silver Rocket”, I think. It had a silver bullet-shaped cap on it. I’d left it there on a Friday and on Monday morning the cap was there but the drink wasn’t. I put up a sign in English and Spanish that said, “To whoever stole my drink, you owe me $2.42,” with the cap taped to the sign. Whoever it was hasn’t paid me yet.
Rat bastard.
I assume it was someone on the cleaning crew since it apparently happened after everyone had left. I’ve also heard that they bring their kids with them, so it might have been a syphillitic-afterbirth-of-a-lower-Slobovian-gangbang-snot-running-down-his-nose-greasy-fingers-smearing-shabby-clothes-little-rugrat.
Lunches getting swiped happens all the time in my very nice office building full of well paid individuals.
One of the funniest stories:
One of the people on my team is very into eating healthy and brings in her own lunch every day. She was at the microwave heating up her lunch (I’m sure a roasted, skinless chicken breast or something suitably healthy) when another person came into the kitchen (we’ll call this other person SDT)
SDT started talking to my teammate about how her lunch was stolen the previous week. They start sharing stories about stolen food and laughing. SDT removes her salad from the fridge and reaches back into the fridge, grabs my teammate’s salad dressing and proceeds to dump it all over the top of her salad.
So, stealing food is wrong, stealing salad dressing is okay!
SDT stands for Salad Dressing Thief which is how we refer to this person in private.
A co-worker bought a pint of flavoured coffee cream. She used it the day she brought it in, and I had some in my coffee with her. (It doesn’t take much.) I think she had some one another time. The next time she went to put it in her coffee, there were like two drops (really) in the carton. She hasn’t bought any since.
Once we had some left-over lasagne from a meeting. A big tray about two feet long. There was a lot left and the same co-worker and I took most of it home (we bought it together for the potluck/meeting). There was still some left. The next day we looked in the pan. Someone had taken the rest of the lasagne (no problems; it was “for anybody”) and the pan was empty. That’s right. Someone put the empty pan back in the fridge instead of tossing it in the trash can. It’s not that someone ate the lasagne; as I said it was surplus. It was just weird for someone to put the empty pan back. What? Were they trying to make it look like they didn’t take any? If so, why would they care?
Our company is in three buildings. Our department came from one of the “nice” ones. In the little bunker we’re in now, the guards have to keep the cupboards locked so people don’t steal the coffee, sugar, creamer and tea.
At the place I used to work, years ago, we had similar problems with the after-hours cleaning crew. If there was anything remotely yummy-looking left in the fridge overnight, it was gone the next morning. We complained to the management, who complained to the cleaning company. The cleaning company’s position was: “we don’t know who’s doing it, so we can’t do anything about it,” and that’s the position management took (which struck me as weird; we were working on classified military projects, and no one cares that there’s a thief on the cleaning crew? Sheesh.).
Anyway, a couple guys baited the fridge with some leftover pizza and rigged up a video camera up above the dropped ceiling. Came in the next day, no pizza. The thief had, however, left a nice impression on the video tape (“All right! Pizza!”) Confronted with hard evidence, the cleaning contractor got rid of the perp.
Moral: Don’t cross wily EEs with access to technology, and most certainly do not steal their lunch.
Heh. One place I worked, you needed two people who each knew a different combination to get in, plus two people had to sign the alarm log. Ditto any of the rooms. Anyone without the proper clearance had to be escorted (even on the roof), and while an employee could be in the hallway alone, there had to be someone else in the building – two people together if they were in one of the rooms.
I used to work in an office with a woman who regularly stole coffee, tea, sugar and powdered creamer, and even the little wooden stirrers. She would very matter-of-factly take the stuff (a couple packets of the pre-measured coffee one day, a box of Equal another day, a box of tea bags later that week…) and put it in her tote bag when she left at the end of the day.
Just bizarre.
My grandfather used to tell a story about how he stopped food theft at his office. This was back in the 50s, though, so I doubt access to the necessary equipment is quite so easy.
Anyway, every Wednesday my grandmother had her bridge club, and would always bring a cake. My grandfather was working the night shift, and would bring in the leftover cake for his group. There were two other groups in the building, and while his group was working, they’d always come in and raid their office for cake.
One week he finally had enough, so he went by the Buffalo Zoo. He talked to one of the animal keepers, and got a nice-sized piece of elephant dung. He took it home, put it in a cake box, frosted in and brought it into work. He left it sitting on a table while he and his co-workers went off, and it was gone when they came back.
We have to hide food in my office because things go missing after we leave for the night. I’m not saying saying our custodian steals. I personally think someone comes up from one of the other floors and takes food. We started hiding food after a full 2-liter bottle of Dr Pepper was taken.
“On random days I put large amounts of powdered ex-lax in one or more items in this fridge. Feeling lucky today?”
You won’t have to actually put anything in the food. This way you avoid any possible litigation if someone were to eat ex-lax laced (or otherwise tampered with) food.