So about a week ago, I went out to get my tires replaced on my car and picked up a tasty sandwich from local San Mateo deli, The Ravioli House.
http://www.townme.com/the-ravioli-house-delctsn-san-mateo-ca-94401
I opted for an Italian combo sandwich which will fill any healthy appetite with it’s homemade salami cotto, proscuitto, mortadella, provolone and garlic jalapeno spread. It has all the traditional fixins and is served on freshly baked bread from Le Boulanger (I recommend getting it on a soft roll or Dutch Crunch). I could only finish half of it (this thing is gynormous) so I took the rest back to work, excited to save for another meal later in the week.
Our office refrigerators are actively used by probably 50 people. There is a certain etiquette that goes with any work refrigerator I think:
1) Clean your stuff out after a week – no one wants to see live cultures in the refrigerator
2) Condiments are pretty much open territory for sharing (do we really need to ding people for taking a bit of salad dressing here and there? Come on people.)
3) Most important rule of all – do not take any food that is not your own. Especially if it is someone’s leftovers (who knows what they did to that before they put it in the fridge!)
4) If you want to be truly anal about it, label all your food and then hope that people respect it and leave it alone.
Generally, whenever I put anything in the fridge I can assume it will be there later. I was not so lucky this time around. Two days later I went back to the fridge, excited for my second dose of Italian meats and – !?! My sandwich was gone. I checked both refrigerators multiple times, and I even thought maybe there was a cleanout?! But then I saw a bag of food I’d left in there a day or two earlier and it was still intact. Let me be clear. My sandwich was not packaged neatly, or in a nondescript brown paper bag that could have been mistaken for someone else’s food. No, it was wrapped in parchment paper and that was it. Clearly someone saw it, grabbed it, and took it as their own.
Here I was with no lunch and no idea of where it had gone. Of course this was not the end of the world. I easily was able to trek to the cafeteria for a substitute meal. I was more irked by the fact that someone (phantom food stealer) KNEW this sandwich was not their own, knew it belonged to one of their 40 other coworkers and took it anyways! What if I saw them carrying it? What if I spit in it? What if I licked it and put it back in the refrigerator? These were all viable possibilities. Yet this person, this bandido, did not care.
I think it also fair to mention that this is not my first experience with phantom food stealers. In college I had 2 roommates (girls who pretended not to eat then proceeded to steal everyone else’s food) who regularly stole my food (leftovers, vegetables, unopened food – anything she could get her hands on). I once came home from a weekend trip only to find out that the perpetrator had eaten an entire quart of icecream of mine, thrown it out to hide the evidence, then replaced it and eaten down to the level it had been at. I have to give her credit, at least she replaced it. But think of all that effort? Isn’t it just easier to go to the grocery store and buy your own? One of our other roommates even went so far as to post a note on her ice cream that said something like, “If you eat my food, heads will roll.” Which brings me to the close of this blog.
So…I thought it only appropriate that I post some funny “mad office notes” that a friend sent me when she heard the story. I got a good laugh out of them. Given the small office culture of my company, I will not be employing any of these notes, but I probably will label or more properly wrap up my food going forward. And if you’re out there, phantom food stealer – WATCH OUT! I have my eyes on you…
