Friday - Show Me a Real Free Lunch, and I'll Let You Pet My Unicorn

[ninanevermore]

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about how there really is no such thing as a free lunch, and that the lunches your boss buys you are the least free of all.

One thing I like about my new job is that there is a comfortable distance between where I sit and where my manager sits. That distance is the approximate 1100 miles between his desk in Michigan and my desk in Houston. This is the most comfortable distance I have ever had between me and an immediate supervisor, and I'm not complaining. The only way the distance could be any more comfortable would be for me to telecommute. But about once a month, my boss flies into Houston to remind himself what everyone in my department looks like, to touch base with us all, to schedule even more urgent conference calls than usual, and to feed us lunch.

He feeds us a nice lunch, too, in a place that I generally wouldn't spring for on myself. I can't complain about the food, except that it wasn't actually free. A lunch break with the boss just never feels like a real break to me - it feels like work, with food on top of it. To start with, as soon as someone whips out a spreadsheet and starts talking about sales projections, lunch officially stops being lunch. A working lunch is an oxymoron. You can eat lunch, or you can work. Any food consumed while working looses all flavor and the act of chewing becomes labor that you ought to be getting paid to do.

As a result of my boss being in town for 2 days, my lunch in the nice restaurant the place where the universe ends was the only real lunch I had this week. I've been working during the rest of them on a couple of projects that got dropped in my lap. Each project was even more urgent that the other, and each took priority over the other one, depending on who I asked or who was emailing me frantically wanting to know when the project I wasn't working on at that moment would be done. Both projects are now finished (at least until someone discovers that they were both done completely wrong and throws them back at me to correct), which means that my regular work has managed to pile up in a nice 6-inch stack next to my computer. And that, boys and girls, is where I've been and what I've been up to this week.

If I weren't drunk and listening to Saber Dance the whole time, this week would have driven me nuts. The intoxication and music have softened it from maddening to merely exhausting.



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Comments

[mugglemomjsw.livejournal.com]

Huh. I totally know what you mean. Working lunches essentially don't really 'work' in the manner that a lunch is a BREAK!! The last thing I typically want to do during a break is talk about what I'm not doing at the moment. (Hence, the reason I don't want to re-cap the day with my hubby as soon as I leave. I generally want to forget the humiliation/degradation/corporation that I was made to suffer each day.

Enjoy the weekend!!

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Even when business isn't brought up, you are still stuck eating with your boss which means you aren't free to say what you want or tell dirty jokes or make fun people. Maybe with some bosses you can, but not the ones I usually end up working for.

[jenelycam.livejournal.com]

I've never had a working environment like that. When we had potlucks or the boss catered in, it was no working during lunch. The boss even sprang for champagne on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve and let us go home early (or we could go to the bar the frequent to continue the party...)

Now? I don't get a "lunch" I eat when I can and am constantly interrupted with tattling, "can I have more to eat", "can I have more to drink", pulling babies off the steps and other daycare mayhem.

*HUGS YOU TIGHT*

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Potlucks are different, but because you are expected to bring something ("I'll bring cookies and plastic cups! Is anyone bringing forks?"), they aren't really free.

I agree that dining with small children - your own or someone else's - is work.

*hugs Dawn back*

what I've been up to this week.

[regatomic.livejournal.com]

tis a busy time of year,..:)

Re: what I've been up to this week.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

It is, and this shocks me because throughout my childhood, summer was the time to relax. I should have been a school teacher; that whole 3 months off for summer seems like a much better gig than the one I'm playing now.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

My life is full of sitcom scenes. Sadly, the quick resolutions doesn't happen during filming. Everything takes a lot longer than 30 minutes to sort itself out, and it's only with careful editing that everything appears to come together so much faster.

[welfy.livejournal.com]

I think the Saber Dance would just stress me out more if it was playing all the time. :^P

Whenever I eat lunch, I get as far away from my building as possible so no one tries to rope me into doing anything during my sacred break!

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Saber Dance is what I see, what I feel. It is the soundtrack to the madness of the world around me. I can tune it out when need be, but when are frantically running around me and I use the Saber Dance in my head to fill add audio accompaniment to the scene, it reminds me how absurd this all is. It's just a mad, frantic dance that people perform to get a paycheck. Even tragedies feel like comedies when you are listening to Saber Dance.

Then there is the state of drunkenness thrown in...

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

I dunno... A lunch bought by a vendor you *know* you're not going to use, is a free lunch :D

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Nah, you have to put up with the company of a vendor you want nothing to do with, and that is a form of payment. They sucked up your precious time with their sales spiel, and then tried to bribe you with food. I still feel used. :P

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

Not if the vendor is an old buddy who knows his company isn't going to get the business anyway ;)

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

But now you owe him one. Nothing is free in this world, I tell you. Not love, not money, not lunch, not anything. You can't change my mind about this.

Oh, and I asked my unicorn. He agrees with me completely... ;)

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

Well, if your unicorn says so, then it must be true! :D

[robin-rule.livejournal.com]

every time i see those dingbats at the end of one of yr posts, i can hear you giggling...

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

;D That's cuz I am...