Work Wars: The Lunch Battle

The BBQ Pit
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I am just not having Happy Lunches lately. Must be bad karma. Or maybe it’s how cranky I get when I’m hungry. Anyhow - feel free to jump in. Today’s examples:

Lunch Bandits - these have been mentioned before. They’re the people who steal your lunch. Why “Bob Smith” would mistake a bag prominently marked as belonging to “Sally Goodenough” for his own is a mystery, but that’s what he claimed. Perhaps Bob is completely colorblind, mistaking Sally’s pink bag for his brown one, and illiterate as well, to have avoided the three inch high lettering. The height of arrogance here would, of course, be to complain about the contents of said bag.

Microwave Police - this is the busy-body (invariably female at my place of employement) who pounces on you like a hawk on a rabbit when the BEEP goes off. “Are you done? Are you done?” No, bitch, the box clearly says “nuke 3 minutes, stir, nuke three more minutes”. “Well, you should just put it in for 5. It’s my turn now”. Fuck you - I ain’t eating half-done beef-n-broccoli just because YOU’RE in a hurry.

This bitch also snatches the box, napkins, and plasticware sitting in front you on the counter in the name of “cleaning up”. Hey - I’m using that!. To which she replies “you shouldn’t leave it lying around”. Oh? I’m standing next to a neat arrangement of critical eating utensils. What do you suggest I do with it? Will you stand here and hold it for me?

Also says “Why don’t you use the other microwave, on the other side of the floor”? Why don’t YOU, bitch?

Diet Commentators - you know, just don’t say jackshit about other peoples’ food choices. Really. I am eating Lean Cuisine not because I’m on a diet but because it doesn’t taste like total shit. Nor does it look like turds suspended in wallpaper paste. Frequently, I eat Lean Cuisine because it’s on sale at the store this week.

Really, you just can’t win with diet comments. “Trying to take off those holiday pounds, huh?” is just as dangerous as “You don’t need to diet and lose weight!” Just shut the fuck up, OK? None of your Og-damned business.

Popcorn Burners - doesn’t every office have one? The person who burns microwave popcorn. On a regular basis. Microwave popcorn is NOT rocket science, even infrequent users usually get good results. If you make this shit every single day how can you fuck up so consistently? Or do LIKE the taste of burning plastic and charcol?

Peel Police - Don’t fucking lecture me on the benefits of eating that apple peel. Again - none of your Og-damned business. Either I will eat this variety of apple peeled or I will not eat it at all - there are no alternative choices. Other varieties of fruit I will eat with peels, but not this one. And it doesn’t fucking matter what your opinion is, you’re not eating it. Unless you want the peel? No? Well, if YOU won’t eat it why should I?

I’m sure I’ll have more in the near future.

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Here’s a tip to ward off the “microwave police”. If you have a frozen entree for lunch, don’t keep it frozen; keep it in your desk so it will thaw by lunchtime; it will be done in 3 minutes or less!. Then you don’t have to be the one using the microwave for 9 minutes of the staff’s allotted 30 minutes for lunch.

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Slobs - These people apparently believe their mommies work here, because they feel no need to clean up after themselves. Crumbs, coffee rings, milk puddles? No problem, Mommy will get them.

Fuck you, you little shits. You make a mess, fucking clean it up!

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Isn’t it a bad idea to leave something out to thaw for several hours? Seems like that would be a breeding ground for food poisoning. (I keep my food in a lunchbox with a freezer pack inside. By lunchtime, it’s thawed about as much as it would in the refrigerator.)

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Possibly, I guess, but being sealed in a plastic container and then being nuked to boiling should take care of any of that. If this actually isn’t safe, then I guess I’ve just been lucky a few hundred times in a row. :dubious:

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I don’t know why microwave makers haven’t built-in a microphone that listens to the popping rate and turns the oven off when it hears the popping slow down to the 3 or 5 seconds between pops, or whatever Orville Redenbacher calls for. What does the popcorn button do, anyway?

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The converse of this is the Microwave Hog. She’s the one that will use both microwaves at the same time, setting them for 9 minutes each, then catching a flight to god damned New Jersey. When the beeper finally goes off, she is nowhere to be found. The only way to summon this beast is to take her food out of the microwave after it has cooled, molded, and fossilized, at which point the beast suddenly reappears and yells at you to “Keep your hands off my stuff!”

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In an office I used to work in, we had to vacate said office not once - not twice - not three times - not four times - but** five ** times due to someone severely burning the popcorn in the microwave and literally filling the front half of the office with smoke.

At the last go-round the office manager had to throw out the microwave because it was ruined and purchase a new one.

It was a rather small office and once the smoke started billowing out of the microwave, it spread quickly to all the offices in the halls adjacent to the kitchen. Anyone in those offices would set to coughing once the smoke wafted in, so every time this happened we all filed out the side door towards the parking lot to get fresh air, and the door had to be chocked open to air out the place. The building manager would then have to be called to bring over the big-ass industrial fan and set it up to blow out the smoke and stinky air.

The office manager sent an e-mail after the last go-round saying any further incidents of popcorn-burning would result in a ban on popping popcorn in the office microwave. Every time the popcorn burned we had to vacate the office and lost at least an hour of productive work time just trying to get the smoke and stink out of the office. The e-mail also said anyone using the microwave for anything needed to remain present at the microwave to monitor cooking to ensure nothing else burned.

The recurring problem had been people setting the popcorn to pop (usually for too long) then not wanting to actually stand there and wait for it, so they’d leave to go do something else, then the popcorn would start to burn.

The building I work in now has a cafeteria, and the food is good and pretty darn inexpensive, so I’ve taken to eating there a few times a week. No more microwave shenanigans. :smiley:

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The sock nuker. I shit you not. A lady in my office has some sock thing filled with oats. She heats it up and put it around her neck. The neck sock has never been washed. It smells like feet. Rewarmed.

The egg nuker. Same lady. Suprised? Nothing puts a stink into the entire floor of an office building as nuked eggs first thing in the morning. Well, almost nothing.

The fish nuker. See above.

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IMHO the worse by far is the person who takes your lunch when he would have to be a total clueless moron to not notice.

We actually had a lunch room theif at work who would take bites out of other peoples food as well as just steal lunches. They finally caught an employee on video with some eating dosorder on her knees by the fridge taking bites out of lunches. Even when confronted she denied everything. Man! That’s a problem.

We have a guy at work now that will heat up something in a dish. Put the dirty dish back in the fridge so he can use it again later. Bugs the crap out if me. I’ve asked him to please use a dish with a cover. Of course there’s the inevitable problem of stuff being left in the fridge way too long. I cleaned it out last Monday and got crap from throwing some of his stuff away.
Sorry man, put your stuff in a resealable container not in half open foil and that won’t happen.

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The Pastry Hog. Someone bring in donuts for the office? By the time you can get to the kitchen, half are gone and the rest are pulled apart by dirty fingers. Birthday cake? Carved up so badly you can hardly get a piece without clumps smeared around by the Pastry Hog.

The last office I was in solved the whole microwave popcorn thing by banning microwave popcorn. Really, what else can you do with people who are inacapable of figuring out the first time that they’ve set it for too long and they need to learn what the proper time is for that microwave and then use that setting from that point forward?

And Patty O’Furniture, the popcorn button is supposed to be set to the proper length of time for popcorn. Our last microwave had one; it was set for 2:45, but if you cooked the popcorn that long, it was burnt to a crisp. My husband was surprised when I complained about him always burning the popcorn; apparently he couldn’t taste how ghastly it was burnt, either. So I had to teach him to take the time to push two or three more buttons and set it to 2:20. We now have an even more powerful one, and I had to go through the whole teaching process with him again. With this one, it’s TWO MINUTES! Nothing over TWO MINUTES! Arrgh.

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Haggis, maybe?

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There’s a business in this somewhere.

I’d buy a fridge for my office and charge people a yearly for a membership. They can come in in the morning, drop off their lunch and get it back at lunchtime. Lunches will be given back only to the people that dropped them off.

Like a summer timeshare, but you’re paying for fridge space instead of a vacation place.

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Just in case you weren’t making a joke . . . I don’t think she’s eating it. More likely, the sock nuker has neck pain and is using the thing as a heating pad. I’ve seen things like this recommended for migraineurs; sometimes applying pressure to the side of their head that hurts helps relieve some of the pain, and it seems that if they can do that with something modestly warm, it may help even more. Most of the recommendations I’ve seen said to use rice, though.

But, yeah. Never laundering the thing - yuck-o; that’s just disgusting. I’d eat cold food before I put it in that microwave.

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Lunch will be fine. It’s will take a couple of hours for the food to thaw enough for bacteria to grow, and then several more hours (days) for them grow to a point where they become dangerous. In addition, most prepared and microwaveable food is about as near sterile as food can get without being boiled.

Food Nazi- The person who has to comment on every piece of food you eat: Caloric content, nutritional analysis, odor, appearance, etc….

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A friend of mine used to be a food nazi, until the day she said, “What’s that you’re eating? It stinks!” and I replied, “It’s my lunch, and you’re rude as hell.”

Not clever, but effective.

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Oh, I had a doozy one time.

The office where I worked (at that time) had a couple of refrigerators for people to keep their lunches. I brought mine in in a CLEARLY LABELED plastic container - one of the ones with different compartments for each “course”.

One day, I went to lunch…and my main dish & potatoes were gone. My peas (or whatever veggie it was that day) were not. So this means they had to open my MARKED container, reheat it, and eat only PART of the contents. :eek:

Ugh. I threw the whole thing away & then had to go try to bum money off someone so I could afford to buy lunch (didn’t have any on me at the time…way too broke most of the time, that’s why I brought lunch.)

Brass ones, that takes brass ones, I tell ya!

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But how does the machine know this?

Well, that’s why the microwave needs to be able to listen to the pops, just like the directions say. That way it’ll stop cooking when the popcorn has stopped popping.

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[ul][]Slobs[]The sock nukers[]Food Nazis[]The Pastry Hogs[/ul]The Lab Technicians: This group (also “invariably female at my place of employement”) steadfastly refuses to throw out any form of matter (particulate or otherwise) that either had - or presently has - resembled foodstuff. Living by the credo, “there are people starving in Africa” whilst humming Tom Waits’ “Nighthawks at the Diner” to thermselves, these frustrated lab technicians use the company refrigerator as their personal incubator; stashing away bread crust, half eaten containers of yogurt, various types of produce and probably a few acorns for a period that ranges between 6 months to several decades.

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I’ve got another one: The Smelly Food Eater. Look, I don’t care what you eat for lunch. You can eat boiled feet with limburger if it floats your boat. But dammit, if it’s stinky and it’s going to impart its unique aroma into the flavor of everything else in the fridge (or the freezer–stinky food can even make ice cubes taste manky) please put it in a sealed container!

I don’t object to smelling it after you’ve taken it out and heated it up–it might make me gag, but obviously you enjoy it so more power to you–but please, please, don’t make me have to eat it too by leaving it opened in the fridge! This is especially true if you leave it there for several days so everything else in there can marinate in its ghastly aroma.