Stolen lunch in the work place

[bigfatbass]

Back when I had a day job at a community college, lunch theft was rampant. Student center, shared office space, too many heads to count. Sucked.

After one of my bagels disappeared for the second time, I put one in there with drywall putty instead of cream cheese. When I heard gagging and spitting coming from the next office, I confronted the lunchnapper. Unfortunately for her, our boss overheard me calling her out. It wasn't my intention to get anyone in huge trouble, but she got sent home, and got her hours cut for the rest of the week.

That mouthful of caulk cost her at least $100!

It also put a mark on her performance record that I'm pretty sure got her left off the next promotion review cycle.

 

[SnowCal]

My employer provides hot meals at work (and deducts $4/meal from our paychecks for it). Employees rotate on kitchen duty. Pretty sure an employee once got hired because he'd previously worked at Red Lobster and knew how to make the biscuits.

Anyways I'm cooking lunch one day and look through the fridge. It's mostly company food but a few odd items have initials on them so I'd never touch those. Unless it's ice cream. Ice cream is always fair game. But I'm making lunch and see an unmarked vacuum-sealed package of sausages. Throw those suckers on the grill and cook 'em up. Serve 'em on buns with chips and a nice salad for the coworkers. They're super tasty and everyone is a fan. The last person to show up was the bossman. He was less than happy. I guess his brother had stopped by earlier to give him some meat from his last hunting trip and I'd just cooked all of it.

 

[bkbirge]

It kind of boggles my mind that anyone would think it's ok to steal someone else's lunch. I guess I (unrealistically) expect more out of people who get steady paychecks.

 

[casper_morgan]

We had someone stealing from our fridge for a while, it eventually stopped but up until it did my boss ready to fire whoever it was... we were on a witch hunt.... never figured out who it was. Sad.

 

[Happynoj]

I've never had food stolen from work, but when I was at uni I lived in a flat with 5 other people, and my food disappeared constantly. It got to the point where I was counting slices of bread to check that I wasn't imagining it. I spoke to everyone about it and everyone denied it.

I had a pretty good idea of who it was - one of the people in the flat had no money in the bank and no food in his cupboards, whereas everyone else had money and food. I never found any proof that it was him, but he was the one that I trusted the least out of everyone, and all of the evidence was stacked against him.

The annoying thing was that if he had come to me and said that he was struggling for money and asked if I could help him out with money and/or food then I would have been glad to help him.

 

[uOpt]

I would treat it as regular theft and try to have the person treated with the usual for employee theft. They won't fire him for a $10 item on first incident but then it is on file.