If you work in an office, you know there's nothing more annoying than a co-worker stealing your food from the communal refrigerator. It's an incredibly petty crime, since the culprit is gainfully employed, and can clearly afford to purchase food on his or her own. Also, the theft is particularly irritating when you're adhering to a special diet, or prepared a delicious meal that you've been looking forward to all morning.
In a lengthy post on Reddit, a pregnant woman claimed that someone at work was stealing her lunch every day. She politely left a note, informing the thief that the meal was lovingly made by her husband, who is a chef, and he is willing to prepare an additional meal for them, providing they pay for it. She also left a note explaining that she is pregnant, and needs to eat certain food for nutrition. She even left a note warning them that she filed a complaint with HR. Yet day after day, the thief persisted, brazenly stealing her lunch.
"I began labeling my food hoping that would deter the thief. It didn’t," the pregnant woman reportedly wrote. "Eventually, I put a note on the fridge that said 'Please stop taking my food. I am pregnant and breastfeeding and this is negatively affecting my health... The thief was a middle-aged woman who doesn’t seem to like me. She is making triple what I am making, if not more."
However, the lunch bandit did not count on cameras catching her in the act. "After a week of this (I’d been bringing sandwiches and keeping them at my desk to hold me over) I had the IT guy send me a screen-grab of her stealing, one from each day," continued the unidentified woman. "Lunch Thief was up for a promotion. She’s near the executive level, and once you get this high up, the interviews involve execs from headquarters flying down to meet up with the execs in our office to sit in on presentations from the interviewees."
The victim explained that she sits on the meetings to takes, and slipped in photos of the thief stealing her food during a presentation. "She (food thief) turned back to look at the screen in horror," wrote the pregnant woman. "The execs at my office who knew my lunches were getting stolen were visibly pissed at her. As it turns out, one of the execs who’d come from headquarters was also pregnant, and the other one had a wife who’d just had a baby."
Rather than get the coveted promotion, the lunch thief lost her job. "She was terminated," the pregnant woman concluded. "I didn’t want her to get fired, I just wanted her to stop. If they’d ever talked to me, I wouldn’t have wanted to get her fired."
The unidentified victim posted her story in the subreddit for "Am I The Asshole?" and almost everyone said 'no' in the comments. "You didn’t get her fired," assured one supporter. "She got herself fired by being a thief despite many opportunities to stop and not get punished." Facts! The post went viral, receiving more than 20,000 upvotes and attention from various news outlets, but has since been deleted.
