This list originally had 4 things but the other 2 are from an office environment and these were more appropriate to retail. I’ve rarely brought my lunch to work so never had one stolen, but I have seen it happen numerous times to my employees. They come to you with this look of “Who would do this to me, and what can you do about it, Mr. Manager?” and my only response is to tell them someone is here a low-life and they should put their name on it going forward.
As for the restroom thing, yes, yes, yes. Happens almost every day, in fact. I am constantly astonished that someone did not take the 3 seconds it takes to flush the toilet after they’ve used it. Do they get some sick satisfaction knowing that someone else gets to see their turds after they leave? And while I’m on a rant…the automatic toilets that have the sensor that flushes when you get up? Ok, they keep you from having to see someone else’s poop but when you get up, you still have some wiping to do and it flushes right away so you either flush it again (water waste!!) or again, leave your residue for the next unfortunate soul. Oh, the humanity!
The full list is here.
Once you’re old enough to ponder the dynamics of the working world, you’ll probably start separating jobs in your head into two categories, much the same way everyone else does. In the most basic way, they can be separated as blue collar and white collar. Blue-collar jobs range from manning the sour cream gun at Taco Bell, to cleaning dog poop off lawns, to assembling dashboard components for smart cars. White-collar work often involves business casual, a computer, and an office somewhere that you slowly rot in. Both can be fulfilling or soul-destroying, depending on your personal relationship to the work you do. Neither is better than the other, and either can put you in an early grave. Work is wonderful.
Stolen Lunches
Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Do you know why humans hate? Why we have the capacity to hate things? Lunch. Lunch in an office is why we hate. We as a species developed this destructive, dark emotion generations ago, probably even in our proto-human, simian form. And it was all leading us towards the day when we would be working in an office and noon would roll around, then we’d head to the lunch room, open the fridge, and see that some pig puke had stolen our goddamn sandwich and pudding and we had no lunch that day. And the hate that started to fill your empty belly had purpose and direction. Your hate will drive you to exact some kind of revenge upon the shitheel lunch thief. A revenge that would be sweeter than any lunch.
Digital Vision./Photodisc/Getty
Which is why crop dusting was invented.
All around the world, in law firms and accounting firms and media conglomerates and ad agencies, shitty lunch thieves lay in wait for you to put something in the fridge that their sticky, grubby little dick mittens can ooze over and devour. Your Snack Pack? Your Reuben? Your non-alcoholic mojito? Gone! Running through the digestive tract of your work’s version of a shit-encrusted, Soviet-made machine that runs on sandwiches and the tears of the hungry bastards who lost those sandwiches.
According to a Monster.com survey, 43 percent of office workers say they’ve been the victim of a lunch thief. Can you imagine that? How many people don’t even bring a lunch to the office? This means pretty much everyone who does bring a lunch has had that shit stolen by unscrupulous twat waffles. Do I sound bitter? Bitter as the goddamn half of grapefruit that would nicely accented my roasted turkey and Swiss on French bread that I never got to eat last week, because one of these office sharts jammed it in their nutrient dump because they were raised by Appalachian bush pigs.
Valeria Tarleva/iStock/Getty Images
I hope you trip and fall into this dick-first (or vagina-first).
Now, your hatred may fuel revenge fantasies against this lunch thief. And trust me, I’ve seriously thought of just wiping my ass on Wonder Bread, lacing it with a little spicy mustard, feta, and Romaine, then letting fate run its course. But the fact is that no one ever catches a lunch thief unless they install a lunchroom camera, and unless your boss gets their lunch stolen too, that ain’t happening. You never catch the lunch thief, and I’ll submit this is likely because it’s not one lunch thief — it’s half of your goddamn office. They’re all just stealing shit because someone stole from them, and there’s probably more hilarious and disgusting sabotage items than food in the fridge at this point, but it is what it is. We all have to deal with it because the world we live in has failed us. Failed us and our lunches.
The Unsanitary Bathroom
mathess/iStock/Getty Images
I have a theory that there’s a kernel of chaos in the soul of every living human. And that chaos manifests itself only in the most subtle of ways in decent human beings, because no one can resist such a powerful force, no matter how strong they may seem to be. They cannot resist. And so they piss on the floor.
Nick Dolding/The Image Bank/Getty Images
How can I focus on aiming when I’m faced with the unimaginable, boiling, exploding vastness of the cosmos?
Go into any mall in America and look at the restroom before the janitor gets to it. Or even better, try a Greyhound station, but bring some Clorox wipes with you. If you can make it past one stall without seeing a fecal obelisk reaching to the starry skies, you live in a nice town, so you should feel good about yourself.
Every communal washroom in America is a literal cesspool. Without a hard-working janitorial staff, you’ll be lucky to find one in which the only thing wrong is that someone has firehosed the seat with urine. From toilet paper fed directly into the bowl to inexplicable poop on the ceilings, once we get into a bathroom that we as individuals are not responsible for cleaning, it’s like we set our lower holes on a timer and have just been waiting for them to explode.
LarsZahnerPhotography/iStock/Getty Images
Now I am become death, the destroyer of porcelain.
In an office, this is atrociously uncool, because you never spend all day at the greyhound station. You don’t have to endure eight hours at the mall, and even if you work at the mall, you know the people using the washroom are the sorts of people who talk to their own feet and drink gasoline. What’s the excuse for the people in your office? How are you sitting there, next to some idiot in a tie, knowing he probably just wrote a dirty limerick in his own poop on the wall?
Maybe your office bathroom isn’t that bad, but I have never once worked in an office where the bathroom ever made it through the week without at least one Ganges trout floating belly-up in the bowl for the next guy to try to deal with.
Digital Vision./Photodisc/Getty Images
To be fair, calling cards come in many forms.
Why do people insist on not flushing? It’s that chaos kernel. That sense of devilish freedom you get from shitting in a toilet that has no legitimate owner. It’s the world’s bowl, and the world can be damned. Someone else can flush that nugget, so you’re going to leave it there and make a stranger look at it. What immeasurable power, what degradation, to be able to do that to another autonomous being — to force another person to gaze upon your feces against their will, and know that there is literally nothing they can do about it. They’re powerless. And in your workplace microcosm, this makes us all the CEO for the time it takes to pinch one off, or to somehow “forget” to properly dispose of a used feminine hygiene pad and leave it on the floor instead. Everyone else at work has to endure that. Because of you. You made everyone your bitch. And everyone hates you, whoever you are.