If you ever have food at home that you don’t want to eat or receive it as a gift but can’t bring yourself to throw away, just take it to the vultures at the office. They’ll eat anything you leave in the kitchen or common area. Yet knowing that, we still eat what other people bring. And the best meetings at work are those where someone brings food — preferably a Friday morning meeting where someone brings donuts. My team at work has a bi-monthly meeting and we take turns bringing snacks for our teammates, usually they’re fairly healthy.
A lot of eating at work is not based on level of hunger. When you start feeling tired or bored, you can’t go home, so … find something to eat. One time I ate something really strange at work. Honestly I’m not quite sure what to call it; I found it in the back of the bottom drawer of my desk. I have some recollection of buying a box of these snacks and dumping the contents of the box into my drawer – maybe years ago – and was quite elated at first to find I still had one left. It was sealed in an individual, white plastic pouch with no writing or markings on it whatsoever. It was one of those chocolate-coated hockey pucks with cream inside; I think when I was a kid we used to call them King Dongs. One of those foods that would look the same in twenty years as it does today. So within about ten minutes of eating my hockey puck I started feeling gross, sick to my stomach to where I thought I was going to have to go home and lay down. I was determined not to waste any of my sick-leave on a bad snack, so I stuck it out at work but felt terrible all afternoon – I had to pace up and down the hallway a few times, my eyes and nose watering, kind of grinding my teeth.
I was digging through my drawer today and found two more hockey pucks. (I’ve since cleaned out my desk.) Even after my previous experience, I actually debated with myself for about an hour as to whether to eat another one. I hate to throw away food, so finally I put a post-it on them that said “Free chocolate thingies” and I put them in the kitchen. About two minutes later I went back to check and they were gone.
