I'm HUNGRY............but someone stole my lunch!

SPARKY

We have a common refrigerator in the lunch room. Lately, I have heard complaints about missing lunches (someone stole the food out of the refrigerator).

Does anyone else have this problem? How do you solve it?

marc

You will get some interesting answers from lacing the food with a laxative to treating it with a substance that will show some colors under a black light to identify the culprit.

The workplace is the unfortunate recipient of bad behaviors and try as you might, some people will continue to violate our sensibilities.

You can draw a hard line policy and make an example of anyone you catch, but then you have to be ready to catch the sticky fingered ones and then follow through.

Communication of the issues should help. Let the EEs know the expectations and see if it cleans up the behavior for a while.

Cinderella

We've talked about this before on the forum and a wise poster (I don't remember who) said that stolen lunches is usually a sign of poor morale among the ee population. I.E. it is (most of the time) a symptom and not the real problem.

It's funny - I worked at a place for 2 1/2 years where stuff like that was rampant but I didn't think the morale was THAT bad. Now I work at another company with about 4 times as many ee's and have never seen or heard of that happening here. However, the morale here is pretty darn good.

mwild31

Hi sparky - I would do a search on this topic. We've discussed it quite a bit. Good luck though - do you want me to send you a sandwich? x;-)

Rockie

After an employee came to me in tears and said that her lunch had been stolen twice in a week, I put one of my "threatening" memos on the fridge saying that I didn't want to hear about this going on anymore and if we found out who the culprit was they would be fired - no questions asked! I haven't heard anything else about lunches being stolen.

My problem yesterday was nastiness left behind in the ladies room. I can't believe the behavior of some people!

AJ SPHR

I don't have responsibility for Administrative Services (which is responsible for the facilities) so if someone complains about restrooms or refrigerators or smell in the lunchroom, I tell them to talk to Admin Svcs - it's not my responsibility. Sometimes HR gets sucked into these kinds of issues that don't need to be resolved by HR. Just my .02 cents.