The Shared Lunch & Double Dipping

Shared lunch.
Pot luck dinner.
Mystery meat special.

These are all phrases that don’t sit well with me.

It’s not that I don’t like social eating, I do, but I have this thing about eating food that I haven’t seen being prepared. Oh and sure, I don’t see food in a restaurant being prepared but somewhere on their wall is a certificate that says at least the one time somebody bothered to check, they were good with hygiene and shit.

Just not in the same place on the bench, obviously.

And these things always happen at work. The same work where the shared kitchen looks like downtown Baghdad and that’s on a good day. Not to mention the similar state of the toilets, or the proliferation of non hand washers we have on our floor and you can perhaps understand why I’m a little less than hesitant to partake in the one we’re supposed to be having tomorrow.

I used to work at an insurance firm where my colleagues were of many ethnicities, which was great. The job was mind numbingly boring but hey, at least the conversation was always interesting. They loved their shared lunches too, only they weren’t so much a celebration of eating but a competition to see who could bring the hottest, spiciest concoction known to man.

Now the real problem with food like that is not that it would peel paint if applied to such a surface, but that it usually reaches the table looking like it’s passed through the family cat first. It might taste great but you eat with your eyes first, or so they say and mine had a gag reflex for stuff like that.

There was this one guy at that same firm who used to come to things like morning tea shouts and shared lunches empty handed, yet fed from the trough as if he had worms or something. If that wasn’t bad enough he double dipped everything, which pretty much cleared the table for him, the bastard.

It got so bad he was never actaully told when a shout was happening and if one was we tried to make sure it happened when he was away. I watched him at one once and he never actually talked to anybody, he just spent the whole time scanning the table for the next wet thing he could dip his half eaten sausage roll into. What a guy.

Incidentally that guy was the first ‘blogger’ I ever met. I only found out he blogged because he added every new employee’s email address to his distribution list that he used to announce he had a new posting, which was almost always, without fail, shit.

He liked to think of himself as a political watchdog and would write about how little money he and his family had under the government of the time, which was their entire fault of course and nothing to do with the fact that his wife wouldn’t work because she was manic depressive. It only took me about five minutes of talking to the guy to find out why that was too. The boring bastard.

But I think I know where this fear of the unseen really comes from.

My step father is to blame. He who used to make the family breakfast clad in his poorly inadequate briefs and only, I might add, after about half an hour of scratching, stroking, flicking and rubbing every surface, orifice and sticky out bit of his ever extending body.

Hand washing, particularly first thing in the morning, was not something we did at our place. Not doing so ‘made you strong’ and ‘put hairs on your chest’. And my toast most days. So I figured if that’s what happened to the food I could see being prepared, what the fuck was happening to the stuff I couldn’t?

So there you have it. An irrational fear of unseen food preparation explained. Now you try going to that next shared lunch at your place of work...