A woman who had her handmade lunches stolen from the office fridge by a senior colleague has revealed how she got her own back in a genius twist.
The pregnant mum took to Reddit’s AmItheA**hole thread to ask if she was to blame for the other woman being fired.
‘My husband is a chef and makes me my food every day,’ the woman explained. ‘I need to eat well because I’m naturally thin/underweight. I’m still breastfeeding my toddler, and I am pregnant.’
When her lunch started going missing, she put labels on her food, hoping to deter the thief. When that didn’t work, she put a note on the fridge saying, ‘Please stop taking my food. I am pregnant and breastfeeding and this is negatively affecting my health.’
And when that had no effect, she sent an email out to her colleagues saying that her husband would be happy to make lunch for them if they were willing to pay for it.
‘Ironically, several people took me up on that deal, and my husband made a side business off of it,’ the woman wrote. ‘The thief wasn’t one of the people who came forward.’
In the end, the poster decided that her only option was to catch the thief in the act. She persuaded her colleagues in IT to help her set up secret cameras. Then they sent her a screen grab of an older, more senior woman in the office stealing her lunch every day for the next week.
‘Lunch Thief was up for a promotion,’ the poster went on. ‘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. I sit in on these interviews to take minutes and flip through the presenters’ slides for them.’
Once ‘Lunch Thief’ had finished her interview presentation, the poster put the images of her stealing her lunch up on the screen. ‘People in the room started chuckling, and she turned back to look at the screen in horror,’ she recalled.
As a result, the lunch thief was fired. ‘I didn’t want her to get fired, I just wanted her to stop,’ the poster concluded. ‘If they’d ever talked to me, I wouldn’t have wanted to get her fired. Aside from seeing the picture in the interview, they never involved me further.’
Fellow Reddit users took to their keyboards in droves to offer their support for the poster, writing more than 2,000 comments.
‘You didn’t get her fired. She got herself fired by being a thief despite many opportunities to stop and not get punished,’ said one.
‘It shows she doesn’t have a moral compass that is compatible with the company she’s working for,’ argued another.
‘For some reason stealing lunches isn’t taken that seriously,’ another commentator added. ‘But it takes time and money for that food. It’s honestly no different than going into someone’s pocket and taking $5-10 out every day.’
