I long ago came to the realization that if I ever wanted to get revenge on a company, all I had to do was send over some arsenic-laced food. The stuff would be devoured in minutes, then everyone would start feeling sick and keel over, and by the time investigators show up, the cleaning staff would already have taken out the trash.
Not that I’d ever do that or anything.
I have found one item that nobody will eat though. Double-salt licorice. That stuff is nasty! I put some out once, and half an hour later someone stuck a note to it saying “Don’t Eat! Bad!”
My husband works in the same building as the Chief Muckety Mucks in his company. And since he’s tech support, it’s not at all suspicious for him to be anywere in the building at any given time. So he gets some nice free food sometimes. And then once a month or so, his team goes out to lunch on the company dime.
What? No balut? No 1000 year eggs? No rakfisk? No haggis?
Hell’s bells, this is a perfect time and place to offer up a plate of nice, steaming hot Rocky Mountain Oysters!
Ahh… for the good old days when neuron research was still new and blue-green. My father was a bio dept. grad student while his department was part of the move to study, and categorize, the operation of neurons and how they transmit signals. For this work to proceed it was simplest to find a large, common nerve that could be easily isolated for study.
The nerve that ended up being chosen was the lobster axon. As a by-product of harvesting the nerve the biology department ended up with a large store of food-grade lobster claws. Which were distributed to bio dept. grad students on a needs basis.
Yes, for a short, shining moment, the poor starving grad students would be eating lobster meat.
It’s just that when you’re sitting there in the tiny break room for your mandatory 15 minutes, reading the local section of the paper, drinking coffee that was ground 2 years ago and been sitting in a warehouse until it found its way to your office, well, the store bought sugar cookies with psychedelic frosting that someone brought in last night can only improve that depressing few minutes, right?
[QUOTE=Madd Maxx]
Engineers can smell free food like a great white can smell blood.
so very, very, true. i worked at an a-e firm for quite a while. we (the non-engineers) would have a signal for when the meeting was over, so we could get to the free lunch before the engineers. the signal only worked when engineers were not at the seminar or luncheon. they apparently had their own signal.
getting a free dessert after a meeting/seminar was about as lucky as a multi-million dollar lottery win. you had to be super duper fast.
recently i was at a firm that was only arch. and int.; the food actually lasted 2 days. i was baffled… how did the food (in this case chicken breast, really good, well prepared chicken breast.) last past day one? there were at least 40 people in the firm, there maybe a few vegans, but it was really, really, good food!
We have a designated spot for giving away food. You can send out an email as a courtesy, but it doesn’t matter. Any food in that spot is fair game and will be destroyed.
However, there is a certain threshold where an office starts to backlash. Too much food, and it’s not gone in a day or two, and it’ll be there for months. At Christmas, various people brought in unwanted candy and cookies such that there was a massive pile. We’re talking two huge boxes of truffles, a giant bucket of peanut brittle, hundreds of cookies, and so on, and every time there’d be a dent, someone would bring in twice as much stuff. There were 11 people working in our office at the time. Now, we can go through two boxes of cookies in 2 hours, but that stuff just sat there for months. After the first week, people just didn’t touch it. People can be sheep - they see the food isn’t getting eaten fast enough and they just won’t eat any more.
One time, there was a bunch of really random stuff there like mini bottles of shampoo and weird truck stop energy pills. Someone made a comment about it at a meeting held nearby and one of my co-workers got an interested look, went over to the pile, opened a packet of energy pills and ate them all at once. He then rejoined the meeting without comment. I guess that’s how the cookies disappear so fast.
On a related note: Mod, feel free to consider this a hijack.
I work for an internationally-know chain that starts with “Wal”, and I work in the grocery department. We have pistachio nuts in an open bin in the fresh foods area. On a regular basis, people pass by & grab a handful, munching as they shop. I’ve seen (mostly older men) customers grab a handful, pocket it, then grab another handful to munch.
I asked our dept manager how to handle it. I was told to inform the customer that it was okay to sample one or two nuts for freshness. Eating more was considered theft.
The first customer I informed of this acted embarrassed & walked away. The second walked away, then came back about 1/2 hour later with a cart full of merchandise. “See, I wasn’t steeling.” He informed me.
So far, all the things that have stuck around at my office have been souvenirs from China. Our chairman brought back some very rancid-tasting fish crackers that were eventually discreetly thrown in th back dumpster.
A couple of years later, our president brought back Beef Grain, which was some of the most foul stuff I’ve ever tasted, and that’s from a guy who loves the taste of natto. After a few people (myself included) gave it an exploratory taste test, it was only used for dares or practical jokes. It was dumped with less than a tenth eaten.
In contrast, the case of shark fin flavored pretzel sticks and bag of dried seaweed chips were gone in two days.
Absolutely. My office is full of engineers and tech types and I swear you could put dog food out in the break room and they’d eat it. My theory is that they remember the days when they were starving students and free food was a blessing .
I worked at a place which, to show how dedicated the organization was to get the project done, started serving catered dinners. Not very good, but everyone stayed because the managers stayed. It was a he-man engineer thing, as each group showed they were tougher by serving dinner earlier and earlier in the project.
Office Manager: brownie crumbs dropping from her mouth all over her chest and lap I can’t eat chocolate, it messes with my blood pressure medicine, my hormone therapy, my arthritis medication, my teeth, whatever it is she say (She implies it would not be good for her health, I mean, really not good.)
Me: why are you eating that if you know you shouldn’t?
Co-workers: aww let her enjoy her double chocolate fudge brownie, it’s been a rough day.
Like dropping dead from eating the brownie wouldn’t be the ultimate ‘rough day.’ There were sugar cookies especially made for her there, she chose the killer brownie over them. :rolleyes:
She hate raisins too. But she was in that breakroom last Monday (17th) morning eating that raisin soda bread our resident cook brought in. I’ll never understand the mindset of 'It’s free, I shall eat whether I like it (can have it) or not.
A long time ago, at one of my first jobs (retail), we had a guy on staff, Paul, who would hog anything left as free food on the lunch table. In an effort to see just how far Paul would go to eat something for free, a few of the guys bought a bag of Hershey’s kisses and a bag of dog kibble, wrapped kibble bits in the Hershey’s wrappers, and then warned everyone else off from eating the bait left in a bowl.
Later that afternoon, Paul was spied steadily snacking on a supply he’d stuffed into his pocket, for munching on the sales floor. No one could believe their eyes. Finally the assistant manager walked up and said, “Feeding the chocoholic today, eh?” Paul answered, “Yup, though I have to say, these are a little bit crunchy. Did somebody get these in Woolworth’s? Their stuff tends to be a little stale.” :eek: :smack:
I think ‘free food’ pushes those primal hunter-gatherer buttons in us- it’s there for the taking - you just have to reach out and pluck it. We can’t resist - it’s ingrained in us.
A couple years ago, I was hanging out with my friend Troy McClureSF in Chicago. He was travelling with a friend of his (that I didn’t know) and we had a brief and pleasant encounter with a couple of this guy’s relatives, who had come in from Indiana. They were discussing where to eat and the guy’s mom was dead set on going to Chili’s, because she had a gift certificate there.
That’s right, she had driven in from Indiana to a city with eight million restaurants and she HAD to go to Chili’s. What the hell?
I work for a Fortune 50 company. As budget coordinator, it’s my job to beat employees into submission when they violate company policy.
“Scott, I see that you had breakfast catered in for your meeting last Tuesday.”
“The meeting started at 7:30am!”
“I realize that, but you know the rules. Unless there are non-employees present at the meeting, it has to last longer than than 2 hours in order to justify catering. Your meeting was a half hour.”
“You don’t understand. If I didn’t order breakfast, no one would come!!!”
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