Just curious, what is it about “FREE FOOD!” that turns an army of obese cubicle drones into children too malnourished for even Sally Struthers to save?
As a thank you for a hard week last week, my work group gets the thrill and honor of going to eat. Together, as a team, we will invade Chilis!
Just what I wanted to do on a Friday night. Let’s see, there are only 6 trillion decent Tex Mex places around. But, no! Nothing will seperate suburbanites from their chains.
Oh well, I guess I’ll spend Friday night listening to people discuss what’s on sale at Wal Mart while I’m ‘eating good in the neighborhood.’
I think you might want to consider how lucky you are. I wouldn’t trust management to be able to find one of the good local resturants, and instead choose an old-established place that’s surviving on its fading reputation from 30 years or more ago.
When I worked in an office, the only thing dividing up my day was meals… I would respond to free food faster than a cattle prod. Oh diversion! Oh excitement! Oh, er, deviation from the norm!
That being said, my parents like Chilis and Applebees. I’m wary of their salads, so I generally pass. If we had a cheesecake factory, though, I might be all over that one but can’t say I’d eat more than just cheesecake…
When I go on business trips, I usually ask people for suggestions of where to eat, and they usually some up with some pretty good places. The last trip I went on, though, I was sent with two of the guys from my department. One of those two only eats chicken fingers, pizza and hamburgers.
I made polite the first day, and went to Fridays. Then spent the rest of the week trying out the sushi place and the Indian restaurant.
Why would I want to go hundreds of miles from home and at Fridays?
Up until recently, it was common for breakfast and lunch meetings to be catered by the little cafe on the first floor. Anything from cookies and fruit to full hot meals complete with dessert & soda. Most of the time the people in the meeting would just go after it was done, leaving the remaining food behind. A select group of us would single out these meetings and descend upon the remains like vultures. The catering people knew it would just be thrown away so they helped us.
Sometimes we got cold sandwiches, sometimes we got hot tortelini & sauce, and sometimes we got cans of pop or juice. All of us had stocks of food gained this way. One time, we found a meeting that had left a huge container of ice cream behind, with bowls of nuts, cherries, whip cream, and hot fudge next to it. Just left it there. We took good care of it.
Now they’re going through a cost cutting frenzy, and catered meals are now a thing of the past.
At the last place I worked, I’d constantly organise meals out, but if I organised anything but a curry, no-one was interested. It got to the stage where we’d been to all the curry restaurants several times but not one italian, chinese, french…
I even tried using voting buttons on my e-mails like the following, but to no avail
“Chinese please. I fancy a change.”
“Curry please. I’d also like to declare that I’m a paedophile.”
I thought this thread would be about how people will eat absolutely anything between the hours of 8 and 5, as long as you leave it next to the coffee machine. (It occurs to me that this could be an interesting science project).
These same people, however, will bitch up a storm if you organize a free holiday luncheon and try to feed them the same thing they ate at the last holiday luncheon twelve months ago.
So true. My boss and I have a running joke about how you can put any kind of food in the break room and it won’t last an hour. My girlfriend one time bought a bunch of tins of mints on a super sale that ended up being nasty. She didn’t want to just throw them away so she wondered what to do. I brought them into work and put them in the break room. Twenty minutes later they were all gone.
Last year a childhood friend’s mom had a 70th birthday party in Palm Springs. I won a huge box of assorted dates. I don’t like them and neither does my girlfriend. They sat in my fridge for a couple of months before I realized what to do. Into the break room and they were gone in a hour.
A co-worker’s wife started a marketing job with a new energy drink company. He brought several cases of the drinks in to the break room. All anyone could talk about was how shitty they tasted yet they all disappeared in a couple of days.
The boss and I decided that we would devise an experiment to see just how nasty the food would have to be before it wouldn’t disappear. The best we could come up with was an opened tin of sardines with a few paper plates and a plastic fork. I swear that I’m going to try it some day.
Our office is disaffected civil service computer professionals and a smattering of college-aged student workers. No food, no matter how foul, lasts in the break room.
It’s not just cube drones and students, it’s everyone. I work in a factory and we commonly have pot lucks for holidays. It’s amazing how creative folks can get with electric roasters and slow cookers, by the way. Always funny to see the management folks standing at an aisle intersection, noses in the air sniffing out which zone has the best smells, so they can come mooch a free meal.
I regularly test out new recipes on coworkers to perfect them before serving it at a family dinner, simply because they really will eat anything. Hard to get a decent critique out of them, though, it’s just “Food, good!”
Engineers can smell free food like a great white can smell blood.
When we had our company holiday luncheon last year, we had employees who work virtual 99% of the time, drive 45+ minutes to eat store bought potato salad, premade sandwiches and cheap off-brand soda. They came in, filled their plates a couple of times and drove back home. It would have been reasonable if they had socialized at all, but it was just; wait in line, pile food on plate, inhale food, go back through the line again, leave.
I’ve got a dish of lollipops on my desk that someone else left here back around Christmas…it would certainly be interesting to see how fast they’d go if I brought them over to the coffee machine.
Right now in my office (insurance agency) there are free girl scout cookies. That’s right, the holy grail of treats that one can only get once a year and my boss bought about 50 boxes for the office. Being as he is a smart guy he only puts out about 2 boxes at a time because he is afraid that if all of his employees are standing in the breakroom eating like they have never seen food before a couple of people might accidentally start in on the drywall.
but can’t say I’d eat more than just cheesecake…
