Who steals other people's food? This is completely bizarre to me. Do these people do it every day and just never bring their own lunch? Do they just see something that takes their fancy and decide to nick it? The mind boggles.
I don't know the motivation but it's a common problem for some reason. I worked at one place where it got so out of hand me a few other co-workers got fed up and spiked a bunch of our leftovers with brutally hot habanero sauce and left them in the fridge in the lunchroom. It worked.
Mistakes happen. There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch, and having a 'zero tolerance' policy is a good way to end up firing an innocent person.
| There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch Want to give us some examples?
I've eaten/drank parts of co-workers lunches unwittingly thinking they were part of the community food/beverage selection.
I never got reprimanded, but I did have to sheepishly explain to a coworker that I drank his soda thinking it was one of the community ones since it was in the door of the fridge and unmarked.
I now work at a company with an extensive free kitchen and you have to do an extremely good job of marking your personal food since the default assumption will now be that the food is everyones.
Kind of orthogonal to the story, but anyone who steals lunch or food from a co-worker should be fired immediately. There's a 0% chance that someone who steals others' stuff is a good, honest person in other parts of their life.
Mistakes happen. There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch, and having a 'zero tolerance' policy is a good way to end up firing an innocent person.
Accidentally take, sure. Accidentally consume? Maybe one bite. Unless there were some odd circumstances, like mental deficiency, or nearly identical meals, beyond one bite is very difficult to believe.
Mistakes happen. There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch, and having a 'zero tolerance' policy is a good way to end up firing an innocent person.
Do tell, which are a couple of those ways that someone might accidentally pick someone else's lunch box, open it, and start eating some unknown food without realizing?
Someone else reshuffles the boxes in the fridge to make space?
Also, especially in tech workplaces, never underestimate absentmindedness.
It is a lovely ending! What I fear for is that the termination will be in his records and he will have to explain this extremely bizzare story to whoever asks or is interested. I'm glad it all worked out so well for him. Hopefully that silly detail will not affect his future.
That would suck, but it's a good story. I'd hope the owner of the company would be willing to provide a reference explaining that he was the victim of misconduct.
I'm 100% certain the owner will be eager to just pretend it never happened.
It is very illegal. Like, violating the Geneva Conventions level illegal: https://definitions.uslegal.com/b/booby-traps/
It's true that booby traps are not allowed by the Geneva convention but that convention only applies to conduct in a war. I'm curious what law applies in the US.
Both the original and the update read like somebody's college English class creative fiction writing assignment.
I'm fairly sure most of the stuff on ask a manager is complete fiction, or at least heavily, heavily rewritten. Pretty much everything has the same writing style.
Let's say you have a particular illness that required a particular supplement that could be added to food, if that food is stolen and causes discomfort, that case could be proven in court if you have a diagnosis telling you to add it to your food.
Kind of orthogonal to the story, but anyone who steals lunch or food from a co-worker should be fired immediately. There's a 0% chance that someone who steals others' stuff is a good, honest person in other parts of their life.
Most companies would quickly have 0 employees if this was a universal policy
I'm sorry, what? In what kind of company do you work where you would assume that even one colleague may steal your lunch?
One mystery that continues to fascinate me is when people at work say things to me that are obviously irrational -- are they sincere or is it some kind of manipulative power play? I've had managers ask me things such as "When will the rebuild of the website be done" and I answer "In two months" and they say "You have two weeks" and I say "Maybe 6 weeks, but not 2" and then they repeat "You've got two weeks." I wonder…
I always assume these type of "threats" are heavy handed suggestions for unpaid overtime. If you're telling him 2 months, and you assume a 40 hour work week, maybe he expects you'll work 120 weeks and get it done roughly on time? Its also possible that the manager has no idea what the scope of work is, has a different view of the scope of work is than you do, or in extreme\hostile situations thinks you're taking advantage and being lazy ("if only my reports would work harder!"), which also sounds like wanting forced unpaid overtime unless your productivity is unusually low.