Which One of You Disgusting Creeps Stole My Moldy Sandwich?
Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Those of you who don’t reside in New York City don’t know the joy of watching Pat Kiernan from NY1 in the morning. See, some New Yorkers are so very busy and important that they need to have the news read to them as opposed to reading it for themselves. Time is money, after all!
Pat provides this service with a sardonic demeanor that pairs exceedingly well with the first coffee of the morning, and even though I am not one of those busy and super-duper-important business ladies, I tune in anyway. Unless I don’t get up until 10.
If you don’t live in New York, or if you don’t watch Pat, or if you don’t follow Pat on Twitter like I do (@patkiernan), you might have missed this special lil bit of reporting.
Remember how, when you worked in an office, you would go to the refrigerator where you’d stashed your sad little white-bread sandwich with its slice of turkey and slice of American cheese that morning and … WTF!? … it would be GONE?
Infuriated and hungry, you’d send out a passive aggressive email asking your coworkers if they’d mistakenly identified your sandwich for their own (which no one would answer). They would then proceed to mock you behind your back for the rest of the week, and a sandwich would never taste the same again.
Well, there’s a solution: Sandwich bags that make your sandwich look authentically gross enough that only a psycho, or the color-blind guy from accounting, would actually take it.
I’ve always wondered about the psyche of the lunch-stealer. I mean, we live in time when food abounds, at a variety of prices, outside the confines of your airless office. Don’t you want to get out, enjoy a breath of fresh air, and grab a warm panini or maybe some dumplings or tacos or even a delicious spot of street meat?
Do you really instead want to hang around the kitchen waiting for your chance to fridge-lift someone else’s mystery meat and mayo that may have been made with unwashed hands or … worse?
And what if you get caught? I would totally get caught.
I hardly ever brought my lunch when I worked in an office, being the sort of person for whom the decision of what to purchase for my midday meal really kept me on my toes. But, if you do, and you’ve come to know the skills of the office food bandit firsthand, perhaps these baggies are for you.
Or, you could take the $10 you’d spend on 25 bags and treat yourself to a nice lunch.
PS: Whoever stole my Diet Coke from the fridge back in the summer of 2007, I hope you choke on it.
See also Workplace Type #63: The Seat-Pisser
I saw this bit on NY1, then Pat tweeted a link to your blog.
I see two problems with these bags: 1, from what I saw they didn’t seem that convincing, and 2, in the offices I’ve been in, when people see food has gone bad they throw it out!
If I ever see one of those phony moldy bags, I’m going to remove it from the fridge (what I do with the food in it depends on what kind of food it is) and place a post-it in its place that reads something along the lines of “Sorry to whoever let their food get moldy, but it looked disgusting and I had to throw it out!”
That’ll teach ‘em.
John, you have a point. In fact, I’ve often worked places where the refrigerator was routinely cleaned out of all things, good and bad, at regular intervals. Which would mean the money spent on your fake-moldy baggies would all be for nought if your timing was bad. And I’ve also worked places where the fridge was so full of rottenness that you’d rather keep your lunch at your desk than enter the kitchen.
But, since a portion of the $10 cost of the baggies does go to charity, and because I have to give props to the generator of a creative idea regardless of its practicality, I’d buy a box anyway … if only I didn’t work from my “home office” where my sandwiches are made fresh and eaten as soon as I want them, and where any attempt to conceal them from myself with mold would be admittedly be a bit crazy.
But I’m curious, what WOULD you do with the food you found? What if it was a stale rice krispy treat? How about a liverwurst sandwich? Or a slice of day-old pizza? Mmmm, pizza.
[...] The one and only OMG Pat Kiernan tweeted my post about office lunch etiquette. And he actually called me funny. I swoon. Now, if I could just get Roger Clark to notice [...]