Looney Lunches

My Very Worst Job was the best kind of special. My immediate supervisor wanted to be my best friend but at the same time, I should tremble in fear of her. You never knew what to expect when arriving at the office in the mornings. Was she scowling over one of her many cups of coffee, hair in dissaray and papers all over her desk? Or was she twirling around in her chair chirping “HI!” at anyone who wandered by? But she wasn’t the really special part of this happy little family. The vice president was a mysogynistic autocrator who really believed that the office workers were his family. This carried on to the point where his poor assistant would have to set up his lunch for him, including kicking people out of “his” table if the other workers had the temerity to be eating at it. When I say “set up his lunch”, I mean it. His wife would pack about enough food to feed an army into a cooler bag and the assistant would then have to heat up the soup course, the main dish, cut the bread, prepare the salad, wash the fruit and pour the home-made wine.

Naturally, eating out of tupperware was out of the question, so everything would be transfered to plates and bowls before heating up. The kicker to all this was the fact that he had decreed that we all eat lunch together. This wouldn’t be such a huge issue if he also didn’t usually prefer to eat somewhere around 3pm. Our day was from 8am to 5pm and by noon, we were starving. He’d be in his office having a snack, delaying the lunch to almost the end of the day! Heaven help you if you had things to do on your lunch hour that took you out of the office. You announcing that you’re heading out on your lunch hour was met with the same disappointment and incredulity as if you had just suggested that we burn the place to the ground. This was my first job out of school, so I stuck it out through two years of this until I decided enough was enough Needless to say, I took whatever experience I could get and got the heck out of there!