Where's the goddam ham?

The BBQ Pit
1

My boss, as he evidently does every year, made sure the emergency staff got a proper Thanksgiving dinner at the clinic today. He brined a turkey, and had HoneyBaked Ham deliver more sides than you could ever imagine, along with a huge ham.

The people on during the afternoon gorged themselves, and the evening staff snacked periodically. I had one small slice of the salty-sweet beauty that is a Honeybaked ham about 7 or so, and by 11 I was feeling peckish enough to consider getting some more as soon as I finished the treatment I was working on. That was when one of the other techs walked out the breakroom and asked, “Uh, what happened to the ham?”

Well, obviously it’s in the fridge. It was there an hour or so ago when I was getting a soda, and there’s no way six people have worked their way through several pounds of ham in an hour, especially since we’ve all been working. So I went back to the breakroom, prepared to point out the obvious and chortle at my cow-orker’s blindness while I snagged a few slices for myself. I threw open the refrigerator door…and stopped midchortle as I stared at the gaping hole where the ham had been. It was gone, every last delectable morsel.

Well, we clearly hadn’t eaten it all, and it wasn’t showing up anywhere else, so there was really only one explanation. Somebody stole our fucking ham! There’s no way somebody could have gotten into the building, back to the breakroom, and back out without us knowing about it, so it had to have been an inside job. Two employees had left in the last hour or so, so one of them had to have taken it home with them.

What the fucking hell? For one thing, what on earth would someone who lives alone DO with 5 pounds or so of ham? I mean, really, there’s a limit to how much ham one human being can eat without making themselves horribly ill. For another thing, it wasn’t their fucking ham to take home. It was for all of us who had to work the holiday, and not only were some of us still working, the third shift hadn’t gotten any food yet. For yet another thing, I wanted some ham, dammit!

What kind of person just scoops up all of something that was brought in for the group and takes it home with them, especially such an uneatable amount of it? The narcissistic? The bulemic? The person who’s throwing a big party this weekend? I just can’t wrap my mind around it.

I could probably think enough better to understand it if I had some ham. :mad:

2

What sized-families (if any) do these employees-at-large have? Maybe one person can’t eat five pounds of ham, but if one of 'em had a family consisting of two of me and one of my sisters, five pounds of ham would probably last the night. Probably. Never can tell, though.

3

The fucking thief, that’s what kind.

We had someone like that where I work. At holiday time, she’d raid every refrigerator in every break room in the building, taking home big caterer’s pans of food without regard to whether or not there were incoming shifts that hadn’t gotten a share. During the rest of the year, she’d steal lunches. She didn’t even have the lame excuse of having a huge family to feed on a crappy salary - she was paid well and lived alone!

My department got her to stop stealing lunches from our fridge by making a couple sandwiches out of sardine cat food (it was pretty much fish heads in jelly) but it took camera surveillance to catch her uncontravertibly red-handed so we could fire her.

4

Goddamn food theives. They’re everywhere I tells ya.

5

Once I worked at a job where one of the women would serve herself and then pack a plate to take home to her husband. It pissed off a lot of the other employees who didn’t get to eat before she did this, especially because he wasn’t an employee.

At my next job, someone else did this, too. Once, we had a vendor send us a bunch of tamales. Everyone was excited to have some for lunch. By the time lunch rolled around, it turns out that the boss took them ALL home for dinner.

It leads me to believe it’s not so uncommon for people to do this.

My rule of thimb now, in regards to free food at a place of employment, is to assume that when you serve yourself that it will be your last chance.

6

You know, in reading this, I actually felt sorry for this woman. There could be myriad reasons why she was doing this. Perhaps caring for an elderly parent sapped up all of her income, leaving little for food. Perhaps she has some kind of addiction which did the same. Perhaps she had been hungry at one time in her life, and she had a compulsion to hoard food.

Not that I wouldn’t have reacted the same way as you and your co-workers. It’s just that the story made me wonder what happened to her in life to make her act this way.

7

Well, she certainly had issues. She used to carry a thick black permanent marker with her and deface posters, notices, and bulletin-board items. And once, she was caught at a manager’s desk with a push pin, poking the eyes out of his family photos.

My employer put up with this stuff for a long time. She had conferences and meetings in HR, and they even sent her to counselling. The first time they caught her on camera swiping lunches, she was given a warning and another opportunity to take advantage of the outside counselling service. Less than a month later, though, she was caught at it again…and that time, it was the last straw.

We would have felt a hell of a lot sorrier for her had she sought help on her own, or responded to the help she received. But she was either unable - or unwilling - to change her behaviour.

8

I had someone stealing my lunches at a job I had years ago and it pissed me off so bad I made a batch of brownies with exlax. The guy that was taking my lunches wasn’t hard to find since he had eaten the entire batch of brownies!

:slight_smile: He was the one that went home to change his pants after crapping them.

9

Yep, I had a boss like this…anything that she could possibly take for herself, she could, including extending her vacation days (making the assistant manager work 14 days in a row without a break) and credit for my ideas (which showed up in the company newsletter as HERS, and getting praise from the business owner). Some people were simply never taught to share, and others never really learned.

10

Just want to say. Doctoring browinies with Ex-Lax is dangerous, and (IANAL) illegal as well, if I am not mistaken.

Doctoring pizza with 1,000,000 scovile unit hotsauce on the other hand, is perfectly ok* and pretty much assures you will find out who the thief is. **

*Hot sauce being a legal food additive.

** From the screams,.

11

One of them lives alone with her 20-lb dog (and working in a vet clinic she knows better than to feed a dog a quarter of its body weight in ham), and the other lives with her girlfriend and their chihuahuas. I feel confident saying that the second person would never dream of doing such a thing, since she’s the one who breaks her back to make sure we’re all getting treated well and fairly.

The other person…well, she’s pretty new and we don’t work with her that closely, so we don’t really know her very well. She did, however, leave with a large plastic bag, big enough to hold a ham, which we assumed she’d brought with her. After all, a lot of the receptionists bring stuff to occupy them when there are no phone calls or filing to do. All I really know about is that she’s horribly, painfully thin and that on the rare occasions she actually eats something in the clinic, she comes back to use the restroom shortly after and stays in there a long time. There’s quite a bit of speculation that she’s bulemic, but I hate to automatically assume the worst like that.

12

Mac, my understanding is that it’s okay to doctor your own lunch with laxatives, as that’s intended for your own private consumption and you can legally take enough exlax to keep you on the throne for days. (Stupid idea, and certainly not healthy, but legal.) You cannot, however, offer said lunch to anyone else without telling them what’s in it. If they accept the brownies knowing what’s in them, or if they steal the brownies intended for your own consumption, AFAIK you’re in the clear.

13

Not so sure about that. The whole point is, if you leave something like that unmarked, (WARNING! EX-LAX BROWNIES!) you could very well be accused of setting a trap, as it were. After all, who makes Brownies with Ex-Lax other than for revenge? And, if said perp consumes large quantities of said doctored brownies and suffers from medical complications due to the subsequent roaring diarrhea, you could very well be held liable for their injuries/death.

Whereas, because hot sauce IS a food additive, and it’s concevable that you might like your pizza/chicken/balogna sandwiches extra spicy, then the hot sauce is the better route.

Again IANAL, but this is how it’s been told to me.

14

Yeah it MAY be illegal (altho without cites who knows?) but Mac would YOU confess to stealing food and getting sick from it?

15

Again, that’s my point about the Hot sauce. If the food thief is eating the food on the premises, then the Ex-Lax is no good, as it’s a delayed reaction. Might not kick in untill Food Thief is gone. If Food Thief eats Super-insane-spicy food, the mad running for water, crying and screaming will make it obvious who the thief is.

16

But then if you were feeeling extra cruel, you could, I suppose, combine the Ex-Lax with the pure Capsesin, and make the effect of the Ex-lax extra painfull…
Probably make a sound like a steamboat whistle in the toilet…

17

And who’s to say that you’re not constipated and just don’t want to take the stuff by itself? The brownies were in your lunch, after all. Why would you put a warning label in your own lunch that’s intended for your own consumption? Presumably the person for whom it’s intended already knows that there’s laxatives in there.

18

But AGAIN. Ex-lax browines, regardless of their legality, Are a SLLLLOOOOW acting revenge, whereas super insane hot sauce draws out your thief instantainiously. Not to mention that the super hot sauce is more PAINFULL. If the object is negative re-enforcement, then the hot sauce leaves no doubt. The Ex-lax brownie effect could be attributed, by the thief, as the result of just eatings some bad leftovers.

19

I’d just make something really disgusting, like a sandwhich containing peanutbutter, hot mustard, Fancy Feast and cinnamon with minced onions.

20

Well, well. When our prime (really, our only) suspect was asked if she knew anything about the ham, she denied any knowledge whatsoever. She even went so far as to explain that she’s a vegetarian and wouldn’t have any idea what to do with a ham if one were thrust upon her. After all, she wouldn’t eat that stuff, and we shouldn’t either. Of course, on Thursday night, this woman had asked where she could find a knife to slice the ham with, and she later made herself a great big bowl of chicken noodle soup for dinner.

So either she truly doesn’t remember any of this happening, she’s lying through her teeth, or the ham was teleported out of the building. Personally, I’m leaning towards door number 2. Furthermore, I’m leaning toward thinking she either took it home for dog food, had herself a merry little binge-and-purge, or took it and tossed it so we wouldn’t eat things she disagrees with. On any count, the mind boggles, really.