Why I don't go to lunch with co-workers

The BBQ Pit
1

Okay, this isn’t the most fiery rant that’s been written and it’s not as eloquently written as others, but here it is anyway.

On most days I go to Wendy’s or sometimes another fast food outlet for lunch and I usually go by myself. I can place my order, eat my lunch and return to work in about 30 minutes, even when I have to wait a couple minutes to get through the line or to wait for my order to be ready. Today I was invited to join a fellow co-worker (I’ll call him “John” to protect his identity). I thought it would just be me and John, but after I committed myself to joining him I found out that we were going with three other people. My experiences told me that this was not going to go well. The more people you have in a group, the harder it is to get everyone organized and ready to go, and today was no exception. We spent fifteen minutes just trying to get everyone rounded up. John tells me these are the people he goes with every day. Since this is something they do each day, it would seem sensible to ensure that everyone is ready to go at the same time, but no, there’s always someone who has to dick around for ten more minutes with shit that could wait until after lunch. This is why our group dissolved last time. When there were 2 or 3 of us, we could all count on being ready to go, and if someone wasn’t ready, he didn’t go. Once the group got larger it became too difficult to get everyone together and we soon disbanded, so since then I have gone to lunch alone. After today, I have further strengthened my resolve to continue to do so, as my story will further explain why.

Once we get the group rounded up we’re ready to go. I find out we’re going to someplace halfway across town, so I figure my lunch is going to be at least an hour, making me stay another half hour beyond my usual quitting time. I’m glad we didn’t go to a place where one has to wait for his food (it was an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet), but I don’t think that would have made any difference. By the time we left I had already been gone for an hour and it would take at least 15 minutes to get back. One of the people in the group (let’s call him Ken) tells us he needs to go get some oil for his ATV. For the love of God, why couldn’t Ken wait until after work to get his damn oil?! It’s not like he even rode it to work and needed it to get home safely. So, instead of going back to work, we all go to the store where he can get his oil. Since John was the one who was driving, I wish he had told Ken, “sorry, but we gotta get back to work” but instead decides to be nice and let Ken get his all-important oil. At this point I’m already fuming, but I’m still holding out some hope, however fading hope, that Ken has some consideration for everyone else and will walk in and make his purchase so we can get the hell out of there and back to work before anyone wonders where the fuck we’ve been for so long! That would be too easy. Apparently, Ken is buddies with one of the salespeople at the store. He spent 20 minutes shooting the shit with this guy while the rest of us patiently stood by and waited. This is a motorbike/ATV shop, and it isn’t the kind of place I’m exactly interested in hanging around in, especially while on an unplanned extended lunch! Finally, Ken breaks away to buy his fucking oil, or so I thought. A young female clerk assists him and he chats her up the whole time. What could have taken three minutes ended up taking ten.

Okay, so Ken finally has his goddamn oil and we can get back to work, right? WRONG! Ken goes back to his buddy/salesman and yammers on with him for another fifteen minutes! When he finally left he didn’t have the decency to even apologize for keeping the rest of us waiting. Everyone else seemed to take it in stride, but all I could do was stand there with my arms folded, nervously tap my foot, huff every few minutes and look at my watch, but Ken didn’t seem to get the hint. I’m just glad my supervisor never knew I was gone for as long as I was, due to no fault of my own.

Next time I’m invited to lunch I’ll turn it down, or if nothing else, I’ll take my own car.

2

What kind of place do you work, dwc1970? And how long have you worked there?

At my office, it’s perfectly okay to do the occasional 2-hour lunch - just so long as it doesn’t become a habit.

3

What a jerk! I hate people. Which tends to lead me to eat alone, as well. At my job, if our lunch is 20 minutes or less, we get paid for it. Well, it takes me maybe 10 minutes to hork down whatever I brought with me. I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose half an hour of pay so I can socialize. Feh.

4

Inconsiderate assholes.:rolleyes:

We get 30 minutes for lunch. Usually we can only go one at a time. When one person’s lunch morphs into 45 minutes or an hour (inconsiderate assholes) that puts everyone’s lunch behind. It is the height of absurdity to ask someone who came in at 7 or 8 a.m. to take their lunch at 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon.

Every once in a blue moon I have the opportunity to go to lunch with one of my co workers that I have known long before either one of us became employed by our present employeer. One of the others where I work is jealous of our relationship (communicated non verbally, of course) and will preform any type of stalling tactic that she can to keep us from going to lunch togeather. But it’s FINE when she wants a lunch partner.
Bitch.
I keep a can of spaghettio’s (spelling?) in my locker so I can truthfully say that I have my lunch here at work.:smiley:
(…and I really DO love them…)

5

Just make sure you leave a tip if you go out to eat…

6

Since Ken was holding up 5 (including himself) from going back to work, maybe you should’ve said something like, “Um, Ken… we’ve got to get back to work.”

The rest of the rant is just water under the bridge. I understand where you’re coming from, but once you gave in to the group, the group and not you ruled.

An occasional lunch together can be welcome, though. Keeps one from being too isolated. I work by myself more than 50% of the time, so I occasionally make arrangements to meet some other self employed friends for a long, relaxing lunch.

FYI: standing around , huffing, and looking at your watch won’t make any diff to a clueless cretin. He won’t notice. You have to say something.

7

dwc1970, you’re a way more conscientious employee than most people I know. I would say you should relax and enjoy yourself a bit more. Or be a bit more assertive and say “Hey, I gotta finish something today and I need to get back to work.”

And Ken is a jerk.

8

Man, I love taking lunch with the co-workers. I had an intern job last year, and lunch on friday was about the only time you’d have to actually talk to anyone socially. (This is assuming you work in a place where your co-workers are at least marginally entertaining socially) In fact, it was the intern’s “job” to organize Friday lunch, which involved keeping track of restaurants, and taking 15 minutes of walking around finding people who wanted to go. As we were on the edge of Chinatown, 1/2 of the time we’d just walk there, making things super easy.

OTOH, while friday normally stretched lunchtime to 1hr, 1hr 15, none of us would have stood for someone’s side-trip taking that long. If they even tried, they would have been mercilessly mocked every friday for the next month. :smiley:

9

I work in a large office where we test printers. I’ve been there for close to three years. They’re pretty lax about lunches and most people don’t abuse the policies, so because of this, some people know they can get away with taking two-hour lunches from time to time. Even if nobody would have cared about us being gone so long, the fact that Ken held the rest of us up was highly inconsiderate of him.

10

Me? I go to lunch with my boss, pretty much every day. If he wants lunch to go an hour, it goes an hour, and I don’t mind in the slightest, since he only counts it as half an hour anyway on my paycheck.

It’s great when you’re buddies with the boss. :smiley:

11

One of my (former) bitch co-workers actually tried to complain to our boss that I was creating a problem in the workplace by taking my lunch break by myself and reading a book, instead of joining their gossip table. This during a meeting between the boss, me, and two of the bitches to discuss their ongoing, openly hostile behavior toward me.

My reply (and the boss agreed) was that it was my break, and I would take it however I wanted to. I later commented privately to the boss, when we were rehashing the meeting, that I had to listen to their garbage enough during work hours, and the 15 minutes I spent reading in my car was a welcome respite.

God I love working at home.

12

This isn’t a problem where I’m working now, but back at one of my previous jobs I pretty much gave up on eating with my co-workers. The people I work with now are actually capable of carrying on a conversation about something other than work and actually trying to enjoy lunch! What a radical concept! The pinheads at my old job just could not tear themselves away from talking about focus group surveys, branding campaigns and marketing reports. It might have been understandable if they’d actually been in charge of doing these things, but the one with the most responsibility was just a junior assistant manager just six months out of school whose biggest job was carrying his boss’s briefcase.

13

My wife and I talk about this very topic on a regular basis.

I’m an antisocial bastard. I’ve gotta work with these folks for nine hours a day, five days a week. Lunch is the only time during the day I can be assured that I don’t have to listen to inane conversations or work stuff.

I bring a book almost every day. We have a breakroom where people eat, but I’ve stopped trying to read there. One of two things happens:

  1. “Whatcha reading? Oh, man, that’s a thick book. How can you stand to read something that long? Who wrote it? Yuck. I don’t like any of his/her/its stuff. Have you ever read any of the Left Behind series?”

  2. “Sauron, I need you to stop by my office after lunch. We need to go over the 2004 marketing plan. Actually, since we’re both here now, we can talk about it. Say, whatcha got for lunch? Boy, that looks good. Mind if I have some? So, here are my thoughts on the plan …”

So now I get in my car, drive behind our building and park there. I can read for an hour in peace.

14

I’m with you on the reading thing, Sauron. I always took a book to work at my old jobs and I hated being pestered with “What are you readin?” every fucking day.

Look, shithead, we barely know each other, we’re not close, there is no reason to make idle chitchat during the few moments of peace we have on our shifts!

I hated that.
Now, though, where I am now, we don’t take breaks. We just eat at our desks and leave each other alone unless it is important job stuff or unimportant joke stuff.

15

I don’t go to lunch with my cow-orkers because I am their boss. I don’t want to presume to invite myself along and they never invite me to join them because, as one person put it, “Some people aren’t comfortable being themselves when the boss or an authority figure is around.”

Fine. I already listen to their whining and griping the other 8 hours of each day… no point in spending my lunch hour hearing it there. Gives me the perfect opportunity to go home, let the dogs out and spend some time with them. They are not uncomfortable being themselves around their owner. Lucky for me.

16

What perfect timing, I just had a two hour long lunch with my coworkers yesterday.

:smiley:

We all work in seperate, individual offices mostly, so we have to get together now and then to retain our sanity. When I start talking to myself more than usual, I know it’s time to schedule a lunch. Plus it gives us a chance to catch up on the gossip. Working independantly also assures that we can take lunches pretty much whenever, and for however long we want. It still irritates me though when you get a lagger who holds up the rest of the group.

So yeah, Ken was definately an inconsiderate asshole.

17

I hate going for lunch with co-workers. Once when I was a temp, there was another temp who got stuck out at lunch for over an hour, and they canned her. I don’t like anybody else having that much control over me. If I go for lunch now, I take my own car. (Making the rest of you wait while he shopped and chatted?!? So far past acceptable behaviour that you can’t see it from where he is. Inconsiderate jerk.)

18

Once when I was a temp, I was in one of those lunch groups, ordered something cheap because that’s what I could afford, and ended up having to pay way more than what I actually owed because some bright spark wanted to split the bill “equally”. :rolleyes:

This was shortly before Harry Potter 4 was released. During a lull in the conversation, I asked if anyone else had pre-ordered, and was met with a tableful of blank stares. Finally someone asked who HP was, and before I could answer, another coworker said “It’s like Hardy Boys for teenagers.” :smack:

19

What’s so terrible about that?

20

I didn’t say it was terrible, per se, although I do wonder what caves those people were living in. That was just one example of how much I didn’t have in common with these people (did they never go into a bookstore? And don’t give me “Hardy Boys” as a comparison to HP!), but I was obligated to accept their invitations, when offered, lest I get the kind of accusations that were leveled at Scarlett.