MIND OF THE OFFICE LUNCH THIEF.
Boundaries needed to avoid grand theft apple
I once had a bag of blood oranges. For a few days, they were my light. Juice dripping, flesh a deep purple — more reminiscent of prune plums than oxidized blood — they tasted of berries and made me feel alive. Paying five dollars for the privilege of eating them felt like a steal.
So when the remainder of the bag disappeared from the crisper in the office fridge, I was disgruntled. Not to the point of posting a passive-aggressive note or sending an angry all-staff email, but certainly enough to contact a psychologist to understand why on earth someone would do such a thing.
An informal survey revealed that everyone has a bonkers story of communal kitchen theft. There’s the unsolved case of the can of pop, half-drank and put back in the fridge door. The bizarre tale of every fork being taken from the cutlery drawer in one fell swoop, never to be seen again.
Disturbing cases of tampering — meat being removed from a sandwich, which was then sloppily reassembled and returned to its container as if nothing had happened — and a comparatively cut-and-dried account of vanishing coffee pods.
It all feels personal (except maybe the missing forks, which seems supernatural) and for good reason — what we eat couldn’t be more intimate. It’s also an inconvenience: If your lunch goes missing, you have to make do; you’re left to face the consequences of someone else’s actions.
As Geoffrey Leonardelli, professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and department of psychology, puts it, just because we interpret these acts as transgressions doesn’t mean the perpetrators see it that way. In fact, their motivation may have nothing to do with us at all.
“Personal consequences aren’t necessarily the same as personal intentions,” he says.
We might assume there are norms in place — say, not eating someone else’s food surreptitiously — but our coworkers may have a different perspective, Leonardelli explains. Thievery to one is sharing to another, although, even when there’s no malicious intent, it’s natural to take it as an affront when you’re on the losing end of the equation.
“If someone took my lunch, and I was looking forward to eating it that day, oh! It’s disappointing. It’s not only disappointing, it feels like someone wanted to lash out at me, because it was my food,” says Leonardelli. “And usually it’s against the backdrop of the fact that everyone else had their food still there, so that makes it even more distinctive, and more violating.”
Contrary to the prevalence of office lunch theft stories — including comedian Zak Toscani’s high-profile Twitter saga from 2018, involving his colleague’s stolen shrimp fried rice and incriminating surveillance footage — which gives the distinct impression that workplace malingerers abound, just waiting for the opportunity to get their sticky fingers into our lunches, most of us prefer to play by the rules.
Sure, some people will always be on the lookout for a free lunch, literal or figurative, and will jump at the opportunity if it looks like they’ll go undetected, but more often than not, these wrongdoings are rooted in naiveté, says Leonardelli. An innocent misreading of the situation rather than an illicit act.
“People tend to operate by the norms of their groups when they’re faced with a question of, ‘What are they supposed to do? What roles or behaviours or scripts should they follow?’” he adds. “If one isn’t available to them with the local group — so if in the workplace, people haven’t taken the time to explain to newly hired coworkers how to respond and how to put their food in the fridge, and how to take food out of the fridge — they might rely on scripts that aren’t really appropriate for the workplace.”
These misunderstandings can result in people helping themselves to all manner of things that aren’t theirs, especially if no one is there to observe them. A kitchen that doubles as a lunchroom, for example, would likely limit pilfering simply because there’s a greater chance of being seen.
To reduce the potential for conflict, Leonardelli adds, expectations must be clear and boundaries defined — whether by requiring all food in shared fridges to be labelled or confining communal and individual items to different areas.
“If the norms help guide people into choosing food that they are only allowed to choose, then everyone wins,” he says.
As loath as I am to admit it, perhaps if I had put my name on that bag of oranges, my coworker would have made their own trip to No Frills instead of finishing them off — although I most certainly would have shared them if given the opportunity.
IT’S NOT ONLY DISAPPOINTING, IT FEELS LIKE SOMEONE WANTED TO LASH OUT AT ME.