The first job I was really terrible at was at a phone book company. I was an editor – a loose term if I ever heard one. I spent four hours a night alone in a room, reading the phone book. But it was at this job that I learned an immutable fact of life: Food belonging to other people tastes so much better than your own.
Every office has had a fridge bandit at one time or another. Lucky for me, this particular office had one before I started working there; I was warned on my first day that someone had been stealing food from the fridge. I remember thinking at the time, “Why would someone do that? It’s so despicable!”
Then, about two weeks later, I came to work one night without my dinner. As I sat there in the office kitchen, I noticed a note taped to the fridge:
To whoever is stealing peoples foods,
You are a terrible human being, who has no respect for other’s stuff! You shouldn’t not be able to work with others because you don’t care about anyone but yourself. Stop eating our food! Typos aside, I knew what one person would do if they forgot their dinner. But I couldn’t do that, could I? It’s disrespectful and selfish. Plus, look how much everyone hated this guy. I mean, they really hated him.
And then it dawned on me: They already hated him.
I’d like to say it took me a while to decide to embrace a life of crime, but really, it took about 10 seconds. I glanced around the kitchen, then cautiously opened the refrigerator door. There, perched upon the second shelf, I saw it. Chick. Mush. Alf.
I grabbed the Styrofoam container with these words Sharpied on its lid and cracked it open to reveal a glorious bounty of bow tie pasta, grilled chicken and portabella mushrooms in a creamy Alfredo sauce. My stomach growled. I slowly drew the box near to me – my muscles impeded by guilt but ultimately overpowered by hunger and temptation. I shut the refrigerator door and shoved the container into the microwave. The seconds stretched on as I nervously tapped my foot, hoping no one would catch me in my deed of shame.
The gods of office thievery smiled upon me that night and I absconded, undetected, with my ill-gotten gains to my desk and quickly shoveled enormous bites of pasta into my mouth. I’d done something terrible. And it tasted amazing.
After I had finished, I hid the leftover container in my backpack. Attempting to assuage my guilt, I reasoned, “It was restaurant leftovers. They already got to enjoy it.”
Once I embraced this logic, I found it easier to take others’ dinners: a few crispy fish tacos, a single slice of gourmet pizza, a bit of sweet and sour pork. Over the next few weeks, my garbage can at home filled up with Styrofoam containers and foil wrappers brought home in my backpack at the end of my shift.
I wrought nearly a month of blanketed terror on my co-workers, letting the blame fall squarely on the shoulders of the Fridge Bandit. But eventually, as you could have guessed, my crime spree came to an end.
It was the holy grail of leftovers, and I went for it like the foolish, blinded, pie-in-the-sky teenager that I was – the boss’ sandwich. At the time I snagged it, I didn’t know it was his. And 4 inches into the 6-inch Italian sub, I heard him coming down the hall. There was no time to hide the last of the sandwich in my belly. But my backpack was all the way across the room and there was no way I could get to it in time. In desperation, I stuffed the sandwich down my pants.
My boss sauntered through the door of my empty workroom, sniffing the air like a bloodhound and following the scent of ham and capicola directly to me. “It smells like my sandwich in here.”
“What?” It was the only defense I could come up with on such short notice.
“My sandwich is missing from the fridge,” he said. “I just put it in there an hour ago, which means that someone on this shift took it.”
I stared for a moment. “What?” It’d seemed to work the first time.
He stared me down. “My sandwich was stolen, and you smell like my sandwich.”
“Well, I don’t have your sandwich,” I said, with much more clout than I deserved. “Do you see a sandwich in here?” I asked, and motioned to the desk. I grabbed the trashcan and showed him the lack of contents. Behind my self-righteous façade I was praying, please don’t let salami fall out of my pant leg.
My boss looked around the room with a slow, suspicious glare, saying nothing. And then he left. I don’t think he bought it, but he had nothing to go on.
Though no one else ever suspected I was piggybacking off the Fridge Bandit’s enterprise, my boss was on to me after that. And it didn’t take him long to find out I’d been making long-distance phone calls to Texas and logging a few extra hours on the time clock each week, and he fired me.
I have regrets, sure. Dozens of dinners were stolen in the name of the Fridge Bandit, and that’s not fair to him. I can only hope that he was smarter than me; I like to think that he was never caught, that somewhere out there, right now, he is delighting in the savory satisfaction that is another person’s lunch.
Brandi Wills lives in the CWE and has a passion for words, photography and good food.
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2009.