The Hamburglar

I was thinking about my old job today. Not because I missed it and was being nostalgic – because I went to McDonald’s for lunch. Stay with me, it totally makes sense later in the post.

Anyway, at my old job we had one of those communal lunchrooms with a couple refrigerators where you could store your lunch for the day. Originally there was just one fridge, but apparently so many people felt like they needed to bring enough frozen meals to last them through the next 6 months that the company had to buy an additional fridge.

With over 100 employees, you can imagine that the fridges were typically packed full with food. And yes, sometimes food disappeared.

Which is crazy, right? I mean, what adult would go in and take someone else’s food? We’re all stuck at the office for the day and sometimes the only thing keeping us going is that Thanksgiving Leftovers Sandwich waiting patiently to be devoured at lunchtime. (YouTube won’t let me embed the video here, so if you want to watch an old Friend’s Clip where Ross freaks the crap out over someone eating his lunch, click here).

I would be furious if someone took my food. Of course, I had my own mini fridge in my office (given to me by a pathological liar… but that’s a whole other story), so my food was safe. And no, I didn’t steal other people’s food and store it in my mini fridge, even though that is a totally brilliant idea that I just thought of right now.

Okay, moving on. We had a few really odd duck’s at the office. You know, like that guy Milton from Office Space – a little off and you hear them muttering about burning the place down? Well, this guy was like a weirder version of Milton.

We called him The Hamburglar and this is how he got his name:

One day at lunchtime, one of the high ups at the company came into the lunch room to get her delicious leftovers out of the fridge for lunch. It was a big, juicy hamburger and she pulled the Styrofoam container out with the anticipation of heating that bad boy up and destroying it. Yum, yum, yum!

However, when she opened the box she saw that someone had gotten there first – the edges of her burger had been nibbled all the way around.

WHO DOES THAT?! Who opens up someone else’s lunch, takes bites out of it and then returns it?

Did you know you could buy a Hamburglar costume off Amazon? Creepy. (Source: Amazon.com)

The Hamburglar, that’s who!

We ALL knew who it was, but we didn’t have any proof.

So one of our brilliant IT guys decided to install a little camera* in the lunchroom to see if they could catch the Hamburglar in action.

It didn’t take long to hit pay dirt. The office provided a monthly cake to celebrate staff’s birthdays. It was cut up into individual pieces and set out for everyone to pick up and enjoy at their desks. Well, the very next cake day after the camera went up, we all noticed that a few pieces of cake looked a little… weird.

Sure enough, IT caught it on camera and it was AWESOME!

Picture #1: Milton is standing in the kitchen. Alone. Gazing at a slice of cake.

Picture #2: Milton has picked up a plate of cake – one hand is holding the plate and the other has been shoved into the cake with icing and cake smooshing out from between his fingers.

Picture #3: The gooey hand is in Milton’s mouth and he tastes the sugary goodness.

Picture #4: Milton has set the defiled cake back on the table

Picture #5: Just an empty kitchen with a piece of nasty cake. Yup, Milton high-tailed it out of there and left his sampled cake behind.

The Hamburglar struck again! Amazing, right? And yes, for those people totally grossed out, we ran in and threw out the cake pieces that had been molested so that nobody would accidentally eat them.

Eventually the Hamburglar was let go from the company. I’m not sure if his weird food stealing was named as a reason, but we all were relieved when he was gone. Every so often, I wonder where he is. Is he stealing food away from unsuspecting coworkers at a different company?

I asked my Facebook friends whether they have anyone who steals food at their companies and apparently it’s more common than I thought:

“A guy at my work would eat other people’s food so someone baked ExLax brownies with a sign that said ‘Don’t Eat’. Well he ate them and ended up going to the hospital because he didn’t know what was wrong with him!” – C

“I can’t prove it, but I am pretty sure people regularly steal milk out of the 1/2 gallon I keep for my oatmeal and coffee in our office fridge. So to retaliate, I regularly drink directly from the carton, so that anyone who DOES steal some gets the backwash/spit/germ experience they deserve. =)” – L

How about you, anyone stealing food at your work?

 

*You know what’s funny; the non-brilliant IT guy would totally read that sentence and think that I was complimenting him. Well, I’m not. We ALL knew who the brilliant IT guy was and it wasn’t the one who thought he was so freaking awesome. It was the other one – the quiet one who was secretly hilarious. So there. Wow, I’m really going off subject today! My point of this was to explain that the camera wasn’t a video but took pictures every few seconds.

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6 thoughts on “The Hamburglar”

  1. Oh my WORD!! I am totally cracking up 😀 That is amazing. The only people stealing my food these days are my kids, i can handle that. Sorta. But ohmygosh the Hamburgler! GROOOOSSS! He was probably a creepy perv.

    1. He WAS totally a creepy perv! One time I was at work super late and he just stood in my doorway and stared while giving this creepy laugh. I was worried that he was going to eat my brain!

  2. There had to be something actually wrong with that guy.

    Before my time the company I work for used to have fresh flowers in our lobby/reception area. They would get delivered Monday morning and typically either thrown out on Fridays or offered up to a good home if they were still viable.

    Apparently every few weeks the flowers would go missing on a Tuesday or Wednesday while they were still super fresh and they found out that once a month one of the employee’s would steal them to take home so she could have fresh flowers for when her book club came over.

    Not food but still oh so wrong.

  3. At my last job, I had a Redskins lunchbox – the only one in the fridge and everyone knew it was mine. I brought it ebery day. One day, at what my coworkers and I called “Chobani Time,” I went went to the fridge to get my yogurt and discovered that someone opened my lunchbox and took my yogurt out of it. What. The. Heck.

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