It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with Alison Green, AKA Ask a Manager. And with office holiday party season just around the corner, I thought we might benefit from some advice on navigating workplace social events. But after reading some of these my recommendation is to skip them altogether. There are the usual greedy and self-important coworkers. And then there’s this guy, who shouldn’t be allowed out in public.
“I used to work with an awful guy who used to dig his hand into bowls of catered food at our work lunches. Like pasta salad. it’s one thing to grab a few chips with your hand, but he’d put his dirty ass hand into a BOWL OF MACARONI. he was a total pig and if there was an email that said ‘leftovers from whatever meeting in the kitchen now!’ people would run to make sure they got there before old filthy hands got there because once he was spotted in the kitchen, all food was officially considered contaminated.”
If forced to go, don’t be any of these people.
Except for Who Made This. Because you can’t eat at everybody’s house.
That’s pure psycho behavior and it kinda sounds like a guy whose name rhymes with “Ronald Grump.”
Who raised this guy, and why are his coworkers tolerating his behavior?
There you go. That’s a situation where HR steps in and sits scumboy down and gives him a talking-to. It’s a hygiene issue. It’s no different than if he stinks to the point where his coworkers are gagging (I’ve seen that before myself).
If you’re too scared to do that, then some authority figures serve the food. I mean stand behind the table and dish it out for people like you’re in a cafeteria. But really, HR should step in.
Absolutely, and if I saw that I wouldn’t hesitate to call him out.
Tragedy of the Buffet Commons
I haven’t seen it at office parties but I never understood how parents think it’s okay for their kids to grab stuff with their hands or even double dip at a buffet? I have even seen them pick up stuff and put it back! “Oh, they are just kids!” Yeah, kids don’t wash their hands very often and are germ superspreaders! I taught my kids better than that & you should too!
Yeah, you don’t get a pass because of age. Teach them when they’re children so they don’t grow up to be this guy.
Years ago, I was eating breakfast at a hotel in Memphis. My seat directly faced the buffet and I saw a kid–maybe 7 years old–sneeze directly into the food because he was too short for the sneeze guard. The mother, of course, just fucking ignored it and kept going. I immediately found a server and told her what I saw. She suppressed the murderous rage I saw in her eyes, and pulled all the trays out of that part of the buffet.
People shouldn’t let their children go to the buffet unattended. I f the mother was with him and didn’t tell the server herself that’s just as bad. And this is why I don’t eat at buffets. Imagine how many times this has happened and nobody saw or told.
I never eat at public buffets. 🤢
I only watched the beginning of that video, but dessert first guy gets no argument from me.
Yes, I’m okay with that one too. Eat what you like.
OMG who just sticks their hand in a bowl of macaroni?
I woke up this morning at 5 and was like “man it’s cold, I should go turn the heat up”, but I rolled back over instead. At 6:30 when I actually woke up, it was STILL cold and that’s when I realized the power was out.
I’m at the office now, but word on the street is that the Pepco guys are there so fingers crossed I have heat when I get home!
Yes, it’s not even just bad manners, it’s got to be for the shock value. He fancies himself to be Puck from Real World. Or he wants to make sure nobody else gets any of the leftovers but him.
It was a little nippy this morning, 30° at 5 when Faithful Hound, aka Balto the Wonder Dog, and I set off with our diphtheria serum, destination: Nome.
You could have it worse. For reasons I don’t know friends of ours who live in a skyscraper residential building have to have their heating/cooling replaced. It’s an older Midtown building, but not that old, circa 1970. It’s very Jeffersons and even has a circular drive out front and a porte-cochère, which is fab. Anyway, the whole building has to be redone, scores if not hundreds of units, and they have had neither heat nor a/c for months. Each unit was assessed for their individual units and our friends are out to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. It’s a wealthy condominium building and I wouldn’t want to be on that Board.
It was 26 when Fanny and I took our morning walk. But I’m fine with the cold until the temps start dipping into the teens.
I had to replace the HVAC unit here a couple of months ago and I’m still shuddering at the cost. And it’s a quick, easy replacement on a house like this. I wouldn’t want the rent increase that’s going to come with doing to a building like that.
Balto was the glory hog, Togo was the real hero.
I had to go read up about Togo and now I’m pissed. He did the hardest part of the run and was totally overlooked. 🤬
At a company where I worked several years ago, they used to bring in a continental breakfast every Friday. Bagels, donuts, pastries, fruits, whatever. You either picked it up and took it to your desk or you hung around and ate with coworkers and then headed off to work. Leftovers were put on one side of the lunchroom for latecomers and people who wanted seconds.
There was one really weird woman who worked in my area. She was obsessed with the food. She’d scuttle back down five or six times during the morning and grab more. We could never tell if she was taking it home or actually consuming it. But that was literally how she spent the whole morning, sneaking back downstairs for more food. The building had a huge central atrium and all three floors could look down into it, and you could see her sneaking back and forth all morning long.
As far as I know nobody ever got an explanation of it. She made good money, she was not particularly large (rather petite actually), and nobody could understand why she just wouldn’t take six or eight bagels or whatever all at once, rather than going back and forth.
She’d do the same thing with candy that some people put on their desks. Once she found it, it was back and forth, back and forth, all day long. She’d sneak over to their desks when they were in meetings or at lunch. People started hiding their candy.
She was in my department and we would occasionally have team lunches. She’d start at the top of the menu and make the server go through each dish and tell her what was in it. Every. Single. Item. One day I just stood up and said I’ve got to get back to work. Told my boss I wouldn’t be doing that any more — it was disrespectful to all of us and the wait staff too. I hate large groups in restaurants anyway — it’s always a clusterfuck. Somebody stepped in on that one and said if she couldn’t stop doing that she couldn’t come to lunches any more.
Some sort of OCD, I guess. Apparently that degree of diligence didn’t carry over to her job. Eventually she was let go because her work was substandard.
Your story and macaroni salad guy combined reminded me of this very strange woman I once worked with. Our company cafeteria “boasted” one of the lamest salad bars known to man. It had maybe eight ingredients, two types of brown and wilted lettuce, cherry tomatoes not in their first bloom of life, and hard-boiled eggs diced really small. I can’t describe how awful that cafeteria was and how meager and gross its selections.
Anyway, the “caf” (as if we were in junior high school) opened for lunch promptly at 11:30 AM and their first customer was always my coworker. She would make a beeline to the hard-boiled egg crumbs and pick out the whites by hand. Every. single. day. She was a very bright woman (and twice divorced, so two men found enough good points in her that they agreed to marry her by the time she was 30) but her work was also very sub-standard. She was also a rage-a-holic and probably bipolar. Why was she never reprimanded and kept on for so long? Her father was a prominent labor/employment lawyer, a fact that only became evident after she started.
@MatthewCrawley That also sounds like disordered eating, if she was only eating the whites which are deemed healthier. But it’s gross that she was using her hands. That’s just rude AF.
There was something about the egg whites, definitely, but the strange thing was otherwise her food habits were not noticeably different from our own. If there was a divisional lunch she’d have a sandwich or whatever else we were eating, she didn’t really seem to care what type, and if there was an after-work semi-mandatory happy hour she’d dig into the chips and salsa or whatever like the rest of us. She was also supposedly a very good amateur cook. It was just that one strange quirk.
Or an eating disorder which can cause a lot of shame about food consumption. And obsession about ordering. If she frequently restricted food she might have been panicked about ordering the wrong thing, seeing it as her one chance to get what she really wanted. I know it sounds crazy, and it is, eating disorders are a mental illness. But it doesn’t excuse her inconveniencing everyone else.
Actually, a coworker told his wife about it and his wife also suggested an eating disorder. She thought it seemed a lot like bingeing, and maybe it was. But I hadn’t linked it to the restaurant behavior. That makes a lot of sense.
People weren’t that upset about the breakfast, except for the fact that leftovers were taken to a homeless shelter. People got pissed about the candy, because a full jar would almost completely disappear from their desks during the day. I don’t keep candy around, but I understand their anger.
The restaurant thing was the one that sent me over the edge. I absolutely hate people who make scenes in restaurants. Even when something’s wrong I talk quietly to the server or manager, if necessary. I’ve been in too many restaurants where some Karen or Chad pitches a fit and ruins it for everybody. Nobody should let their shit spill over onto other innocent diners, but too many people will hold the whole restaurant hostage with their rage privilege until they get their way. This menu questioning wasn’t at that level, but it was definitely disruptive.
She might also have been trying to decide which meal she could eat, there’s so much importance placed on good and bad foods. I am sympathetic but you can’t hold other people hostage to your disorders.
I had to do some breathing exercises after this sentence. It is entirely possible for people with mental illness to acknowledge their issues and then manage them in a way that is not a headache for everybody else. I have an OCD co-worker who is very up-front about her issues, and makes sure that they do not inconvenience anyone other than her.
I was thinking that if she did have an eating disorder it would have been helpful to confide that in someone on the team. They could maybe have talked her down when she started spiraling like that.
I quite enjoy The Guardian’s Pass Notes series, and speaking of eating disorders, this one is about a culinary comeback that I expect to see receiving its due in a future FYCE.
Baked beans on pizza? That’s worse than pineapple!
I saw that, revolting!