The Curious Case of the Office Food Vulture
Does anyone else smell pretzels?
Have you ever thought about what animal you most translate to?
Ex girlfriends would agree I’d be a good sloth (slow, worthless) — but they’re stupid. I prefer Rottweiler (strong, loyal, handsome).
But this isn’t about me. This is about the guy in the office who would be the top vulture in the world — if we all existed as vultures.
When department heads meet around lunchtime, they’re usually treated with a nice array of sandwiches, wraps, chips and desserts. Strangely, five trays of food is too much for seven people, so there’s always leftovers. After these meetings, they load up the cart and ship the food to the center of my floor.
This happens to be right in front of my desk. There’s usually a lot of commotion over the free food, and the charge is always led by the same individual. Let’s call him Ted. Ted stands about 6’2, 170 and probably checks in at about 50 years old.
Ted sits far away from the food presentation area, but never fails to lurk as the food is unloaded from the cart to the counter — like a vulture hovering near the raccoon I ran over on purpose (would never actually do that).
You know he’s planning his assault on the various trays. The awareness he shows has led to my assumption that Ted was the sixth man on his high school basketball team 35 years ago. There no way he contributed in the scoring column, but he was always there — boxing out, playing good defense and fouling the team’s worst free throw shooter in comeback attempts.
I’m also guessing Ted never pays for food. Ted probably has a giant white board in his creepy apartment that charts food tastings, expos and insane happy hours within a 20-mile radius.
Solo access to this tray could feed my office vulture for the rest of 2010.
All of this is in addition to the lunch that Ted brings every day. Ted generally has things in odd containers. I imagine Ted at some art gallery expo on a Friday night with one of these containers, slyly shoveling mini quiches and other bite-sized delicacies in the corner of the room. “This will be delicious on Wednesday,” he thinks.
So I’m left wondering: What was Ted’s path to such odd behavior? How do I avoid it? Does anyone else have a Ted in their office? Is he or she like my Ted? Does anyone have coworkers that would make an amazing type of animal?
And, most importantly, how does someone eat so much G-D free food and not gain any weight?
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I used to work with a guy who was a fat slob and would – LITERALLY – tear a pizza box in half and use it as a “plate,” shovel half a pie onto it, then disappear back to his desk. No shame whatsoever.
Kevin – I’ve seen that move go down. What I haven’t seen is a coworker fill their “plate” with half a pizza. Wow.
I am that girl in my office.
I appreciate your honesty, Yolanda.
our office also has these “meetings” and they too considerably over order. i sometimes think they knew if we didnt get something free at least once a month we might all try to jump off the roof.
subsequently, we had two vultures in my building. they were two older women who came fully equipt with Tupperware and Ziplock bags. they told everyone that they were taking (HALF) the food for their grandkids… but i knew they were just being cheap old biddies trying to get free lunch for two weeks.
Fancy – So annoying.
In that breath, I wanted to update and say some kind person I work with put out a pack of Girl Scout Samoas on the aforementioned counter. The food vulture comes over and takes a whole row. Returns two minutes later and takes two more.
Peeved.
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