Not to do a complete Ross Geller on it, but we don’t think there’s any circumstances in which it’s OK to take a colleague’s lunch.
The working day is long and monotonous and your lunch is often all you have to look forward to on a dreary Tuesday.
We could understand why someone might snap if their grub were messed with – but is letting someone go for this offence going too far?
One woman inadvertently got her co-worker fired for stealing her packed lunch.
To be fair, she was both pregnant and breastfeeding her toddler so her husband made her lunches especially to help her keep her strength up – and they started to go missing from the fridge in work.
“I began labelling my food hoping that would deter the thief. It didn’t,” she wrote on Reddit.
“I even put a note on the fridge that said: ‘Please stop taking my food. I am pregnant and breastfeeding and this is negatively affecting my health’ – that didn’t work.”
The woman sent around an email offering for her husband to makes lunches for the thief for a small fee, but to no avail.
Her food continued to disappear. The thief would even leave the dirty lunchbox in the kitchen sink afterwards.
Driven half-mad, the woman contacted HR and paid for cameras to be installed in the kitchen.
It wasn’t long before the culprit was identified.
“The thief was a middle aged woman making triple what I am making, if not more.”
To expose her, the pregnant woman included a photo of the thief in action as a slide in a presentation that the thief herself was giving.
She was in the middle of the slideshow when she saw the picture and realised she’d been caught in the act.
Bosses at the company took swift action and fired the thief.
It wasn’t the outcome the pregnant woman had wanted, she admitted.
“I didn’t want her to get fired, I just wanted her to stop,” she said.
“If they’d talked to me about it, I wouldn’t have wanted to get her terminated.”
It might be a little extreme but taking someone’s lunch – especially when they’re pregnant? Not on.
