To Catch a Lunch Thief

...and the other side of the coin: one day, I took my leftover half-burrito out of the fridge, heated it in the microwave, and took a bite. I can't remember if it was the first bite, or halfway through, but I realized it wasn't mine! It was steak and I always got chicken. Figured out who it was and bought her a whole new burrito the next day.

Embarrassing, this poor memory of mine. Now I mark all my food carefully--more for my sake than anyone else's!

I feel sorry for the person who would do this to me. I love spicy food with a high tolerance :laugh: Good luck. If I ever get my lunch stolen, I'm the type of person who loves to prank so you're dead meat.

Just reminding everyone that it is, in fact, considered poisoning to spike food with something dangerous knowing someone else will unwittingly eat it. So ghost chilis are okay. Exlax and Visine and other things like that are not.

We had someone using one of the girls coffee creamer. We wrote "breast milk" on it. It never happened again!

LOVE IT!!! I breastfed for 6 months while working as a waitress ( I kept a small cooler to put the milk in...)

Put extra hot sauce in everything!

Interesting. I got some of "Dave's Insanity Sauce" for Christmas a couple years ago. Maybe it's time that it made it's way into some baked goods. Boo yah.

I did this, I mixed it into some houmus, boy did it work!:laugh:

My office has been hit by more lunch thievery and some of my coworkers are seriously considering a nanny cam.

Any ideas out there for how to foil this behavior? I have ideas but none of them are legal.

A friend of mine had that happen every day for a while. He actually bought a tiny little lock set - kinda like one of those luggage locks to attach his lunchbag zippers together and a thin lock cable to wrap into the fridge shelf - similar to a bike lock or a computer locking cable but thinner. It could be cut with a bolt cutter, but his basic attitude was "my lunch doesn't have to be theft proof - it has to be harder to steal than the other lunches!).

A "CAMERA IN USE" sign on the fridge might deter it.

Or, my favorite solution - we had a fridge thief at work a few jobs ago. A few of us started talking about it, and we all quietly agreed that we'd go out to lunch on a given day, but everyone would pack a lunch. We found some bluebell pepper extract and made sure every sandwich had a generous dollop of it folded in to the meat or whatever (so the thief would discover it after taking a bite). I think a few people added something of a more bowel-relaxing nature. It took a few tries, but the thievery stopped.

A co-worker at another job had a friend stealing his lunch, taking one bite out of his sandwich, wrapping it back up, and replacing it. This went on for months until he made a habanero-seed-and-horseradish sandwich. You could hear the scream through the whole building.

My Mom told me a story about my Uncle (who was a big beefy man in his prime - not sure why anyone would want to risk pissing him off!) routinely getting his sandwiches stolen.

His solution, that apparently worked, was to put a condom filled with mayonnaise into a sandwich. That sandwich was stolen, but he apparently never had that issue again!

Of course another thing to do (if you have a desk) is simply bring in a lunch that requires no refrigeration and/or use an insulated lunch bag and a cold pack.

I just can't wrap my head around going in a refrigerator and grabbing a sandwich or whatever someone else has obviously prepared for them self.
Among other reasons I don't know if their hands were clean when they made it or what state their kitchen was in.
ick.

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my lunch go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."

I'd put that on the fridge.

I had a friend who went to the cheese cake factory for lunch and brought her left overs back to work. The cheese cake left overs (as in she'd already eaten off of it) was under her meal left overs. Someone had opened the bag, removed the cheesecake and put the meal back. I mean who eats an already half eaten cheesecake from someone you don't know?

When I was pregnant we were talking on a board about this one day. One of the ladies said that she shared a floor with another company and one of the guys from the other company kept coming over and emptying her rockyroad, or eating right out of the container. When she confronted him he said "well it's a community refrigerator right?" She said "yeah, with personal food, i bought that with my own money!" he said "well it's a community refrigerator right?" He was so shameless about stealing ice cream from a pregnant woman that he kept do it after the confrontation. Who steals food from a pregnant woman?

Someone was telling me that one of their coworkers got fired for stealing people's lunches - and the lunches were even clearly marked with the owners names since this had been happening so frequently! If this were happening to me, I wouldn't even bother with chilies or exlax, I'd just get a nanny cam