There’s something so backwards about how quick people are to defend the wrong person. She stole his lunch and only came clean after literally choking on her own mistake, and somehow, he’s the one who got called out by HR.
This 29-year-old man works in a tiny office, so he and his coworkers all share the fridge located in their break room. He brings his lunch to work with him every day, and throughout the last couple of weeks, it’s been vanishing from the fridge.
Sometimes, it was portions of his lunch that disappeared, while other times, all of it went missing. Initially, he figured he had misplaced it or forgotten his lunch at home.
It turns out he was not going crazy; someone was clearly swiping his food and taking it for themselves. Not wanting to make it into a dramatic event, he thought putting a sticky note on the outside of his lunchbox asking that people not touch his food would work.
Well, it didn’t. He then started bringing more boring, inexpensive lunches to work, hoping they would not appeal to the thief, but his lunch kept on going missing.
“So last week, I made a pretty spicy curry and labeled it with a warning: VERY SPICY, do not eat unless you want to cry. I also added some extra hot sauce to drive the point home,” he explained.
“Not five minutes into lunch, one of my coworkers, Kara, starts coughing and gasping dramatically at her desk. She’s chugging water and telling everyone someone tried to poison her.”
“I told her it was my lunch and that she shouldn’t have been eating it in the first place. She turned red and didn’t say anything, but later HR pulled me aside and said it was inappropriate to knowingly make food that could hurt someone, even if I didn’t offer it to her. They told me I escalated the situation unnecessarily.”
He feels terrible since getting in trouble with HR. He wasn’t trying to create problems at work; he only wanted Kara to quit swiping his food.
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He’s left wondering if he was wrong to get revenge on Kara.
His office cares more about keeping a thief comfortable than holding her accountable, which is wild to me. I think he should try to file a formal complaint and not drop this.
What do you think?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
