Throughout my career, I’ve worked primarily in office environments. After around 20 years of this kind of professional lifestyle, it’s safe to say that I’ve been inside of them to know that if you’ve worked in one, you’ve kind of worked in all of them. Otherwise, shows like The Office or movies like Office Space don’t exist, because anyone’s who’s ever been in office life can immediately relate.
One of the more fascinating sociological observations there are in an office environment is the introduction of communal food; namely the inevitable leftovers that typically occur, because in most cases, office environments almost always end up with more food than there are people capable of eating it all. Typically, in most places I’ve been, leftovers are often times placed in a break room or somewhere publicly communal, and then some admin sends a wide-reaching mass email to notify everyone that there’s free food leftover. Cue the chargers.
My current workplace is no exception to this practice. If anyone on my floor has any sort of catering, the leftovers are often put in the breakroom and the floor admin emails the whole floor to let all teams know that there’s free food available, and then the same people stampede en masse to pick at the remains, and even worse, there are some who simply just collect and hoard, effectively denying those who might actually want to eat immediately.
The thing is, my current workplace is a gargantuan office campus, so there are tons of floors potentially doing the same thing on any given day. It’s gotten to the point where there’s a Slack channel dedicated to people all sharing information on where there are leftovers somewhere on the campus, prompting people to be going to some odd and unrelated to their jobs corners of the property in order to get some free leftovers.
But among these level-5 scavengers are the aforementioned hoarders who don’t just go hunting for leftovers, but like they do on their own floor, go to hoard and save them, for later consumption. It’s these particular people that serve as the impetus to this post, because as I’m sure everyone’s seen the office scavengers in their own respective offices, I have to wonder how many people have come across such office hoarders, who go around hunting for leftovers not just for instant gratification, but for preparation for future meals on a larger scale.
Case in point, these particular individuals go as far as to have a stockpile of Tupperware, saran wraps and aluminum foil in their desks, with the intent of hoarding leftover food from around the campus.
Sure, I’m definitely a proponent of avoiding waste, but at the same time, the typical office environments tend to not have leftovers after the initial call for free food goes out. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s something kind of wrong-way rubbing about how these hoarders rush to amass and save food for themselves, before perhaps those who might have missed lunch due to meetings or engagements can get to them; especially if and when the free food in question is relevant to their particular departments or teams.
The thing is, this has been going on for so long, that I really truly do wonder what these people eat when not in the office? Do they crack into their stores of leftovers for dinner, thus making their fervent enthusiasm for going around and hoarding leftovers more essential than I’m led to believe? Or are they basically creating stockpiles to where they never have to every worry about spending their own money for lunches?
I’m convinced that the hoarders in my office, if not for the job they come to on a daily basis, simply do not eat. Seldom do days go by where I don’t see them in a part of the building they have no business in, walking away from, with a plate, or a boxed lunch, or a Tupperware or wrapped up bowl or any sort of leftover. Or opening one of the office fridges on my floor, and not seeing some sort of container or bowl with large, authoritative handwriting staking claim to something.
There’s nothing wrong with being frugal and trying to stretch pennies, but the lengths that some of these people go to on a regular basis kind of encroach into the Extreme Cheapskates territory, and it makes me wonder what kind of lives these people are leading outside of the office, because our employer does treat their people pretty well, and I do know what these people make.
Ultimately, it makes me wonder what these people eat on the weekends, because 48 hours of not having access to leftovers has got to be hard on the objective of trying to find food. Granted, I’ve noticed that some of these individuals have clocked in on the weekends, which is another story in itself, but I wouldn’t put it past them to start raiding the numerous office fridges for leftovers if it meant having access to more food that they didn’t have to pay for.
