'Accidental' Furniture Theives and the Break Room Bandits

Last weekend when I went downstairs to check the mail, a flyer on the bulletin board above the mailboxes caught my eye, with "Missing" written in large, bold letters across the top. My initial hope was that one of the children in the building had been kidnapped--specifically, the crying baby whose crib apparently sits directly on the opposite side of the wall where I try to sleep.


Unfortunately for me, that wasn't the case. But what the flyer lacked in good news, it made up for with hilarity. Apparently a dresser went missing during a recent move-in. The theft itself wasn't the funny part, though. The best part? The building owner's reluctance to accuse someone of what was obviously an intentional act of theft: "If you have seen a small brown dresser or taken it by mistake..."

It's happened to all of us, right? You're sitting in your living room watching TV when something catches your attention out of the corner of your eye. You turn your head to investigate, and seconds later you find yourself wondering, "Where the *%@# did that coffee table come from?" You don't remember hauling the table into your house, so the only logical explanation is that you "accidentally" saw an unattended piece of furniture, "accidentally" asked a friend to help you move it, and it "accidentally" ended up in your living room.

I wasn't too concerned that I was living among thieves, but I shuddered at the realization that my work life and home life were unexpectedly colliding. I have no idea who stole the dresser, but I'm sure that person must work in an office, and they perfected their "accidental" thievery in the break room. How do I know this? I've witnessed an outbreak of similar crimes at work in recent months.

This past summer, as part of a week-long funding raising event, the organizing committee placed a small, car-shaped bank near the vending machines where people could donate spare change. By 9:30AM on Monday (the first day of the fund raiser!), a mass-email came out that read something like this: "It appears that someone has mistaken the red car bank in the south break room as a give-away. However, the bank was placed there to collect donations for the Diverity Week Fund Raiser. We understand how this accident might have occurred, but we ask that the person who took the bank please return it to the break room as soon as possible." The bank was returned later that day.

Less than two weeks later, the sales department held another event (referred to as T.O.S.S., an acronym for "Throw Out Superfluous Stuff"), encouraging employees to organize their desks, throw out old files, etc. In the middle of the afternoon, the organizers set large baskets of complimentary snacks in the break rooms as a reward for the day's clean-up efforts. Around 3PM, an eerily familiar mass email showed up in my inbox: "Would the person who took the basket from the north break room please return it. The basket was part of the T.O.S.S. event and was not intended to be a give-away." No word on whether the basket ever showed up again.

As strange as these events might seem, I really wasn't surprised--after a few years of work, I've noticed that my co-workers have turned the break rooms into earth-bound black holes. Anything--and I mean anything--that gets set in the break room is gone within seconds. Interestingly, it's the same group of culprits every time...a group relatively small in number but large in both body mass and circumference. Despite sitting nowhere near either of the break rooms on our floor, this group has somehow developed a sixth sense for detecting free food.

It would seem that these people have devised a thoroughly-planned strategy in which they "steak" out all of the conference rooms around lunchtime, hunting for meetings that feature a catered meal. The instant a meeting lets out and the leftovers are set out for the taking, it looks like a stampede of water buffalo. Once inside the break room, the scene that unfolds vaguely resembles an overweight SWAT team storming a crime scene. I'm waiting for the day when National Geographic photographers show up to capture this unique urban phenomenon.


The sad truth: it doesn't matter what gets set on those counters. All that matters is that it's free, and more often than not, it's food. Food safety concerns? Not for these portly scavengers. Mayonnaise sitting out at room temperature for nine hours? Not a problem. And I get the impression that the actual taste of the food is equally unimportant. I'd be willing to bet good money that a bowl of expired dog food sitting in the break room would get eaten, and it probably wouldn't take more than about fifteen minutes.

Normally this odd ritual doesn't concern me--I just try to stay out of the way as I admire nature's savage, twisted beauty from a distance, a scene reminiscent of a pack of hungry wolves tearing apart a carcass at mealtime. But the increasing aggressiveness of these break room bandits has become downright alarming. They've evolved from hoarding leftovers: they're now starting to dabble in blatant intra-refrigerator theft. If anything in the refrigerator appears as if it might be unclaimed leftovers, it's as good as gone. I've fallen victim to one of these attacks myself.

This past summer, I received a boxed lunch at at meeting. I had already eaten, so I set it in the refrigerator to take home that night. I even tried to stay one step ahead of my enemies and strategically placed the box inside a bag in the refrigerator. When I returned at the end of the day to retrieve the lunch, I found an empty bag. My brilliant plan had been foiled, and based on conversations with a few other co-workers, I wasn't the first victim of such a devious scheme.

These outlaws are surprisingly stealthy, which is particularly impressive considering their ample carriage--to my knowledge, not a single member of the gang has been caught in the act. If a witness ever catches one of the culprits red-handed and full-mouthed, I imagine the first excuse will be something like, "I thought it was free to take! I didn't see anyone's name on it!" Keeping that in mind, I now clearly label everything I place in the refrigerator with my name...though given the trend toward more aggressive break room antics, I'm not sure how long that tactic will protect me.

So what should we, the normal-sized, non-frenzied food fans do about this issue? I regret to admit that I don't have the perfect solution to this expanding problem. My only idea thus far is to take advantage of this opportunity for a potentially groundbreaking sociological experiment that will test the moral and gastrointestinal limits of the break room bandits. So far, I've tried unloading way-past-expiration Hamburger Helper samples that had gone ignored and forgotten in my desk drawer at work for more than a year. Once placed in the break room, they were gone within minutes.

In the coming months, I plan to expand this experiment, test my dog food theory, and answer a few other burning questions. Just how far past expiration is too far? Does "too far" even exist for the break room bandits? Would a sign marked "Not Fit For Human Consumption" sitting next to a plate of cupcakes even slow them down? It seems like a fair trade-off: they pillage the refrigerator, and society makes some important discoveries in human psychology.