Unfiltered Story #342583
There was a thief at my office. A food thief.
I typically bring sandwiches from home because I do not get paid well. I make about half what my coworkers are making, and I took the job due to desperation. Having my sandwich stolen repeatedly was financially devastating for me, I could not afford to eat out.
Everyone in the office suspected one particular coworker, with a peanut allergy. So I decided to start bringing peanut butter sandwiches to work to protect myself. Surely she wouldn’t be dumb enough to eat a peanut butter sandwich.
I make a big point of labeling the sandwich box with ‘peanut butter sandwich.’ I label the paper bag it’s in with my name and ‘peanut butter sandwich’. I make it as obvious as I possibly can that it’s a peanut butter sandwich (To be technical, it’s peanut butter, honey, banana, and one slice of bacon, elvis would approve)
When it’s almost lunch time, my coworker with the peanut allergy starts choking. We call 911 and an ambulance picks her up. Once she’s gone I check the fridge and find my sandwich missing. I check the wastepaper basket by her desk and find my peanut butter sandwich sitting in it with a few bites taken out. I photograph the evidence with my cell phone and bring it to HR.
HR fires me and presses charges for ‘deliberately attempting to poison a coworker’. I managed to get out of the charges, I was lucky enough that my state-appointed attorney didn’t suck, but I found out that they viewed how meticulously I labeled it, and the fact that I knew she was allergic to peanuts and suspected she was the lunch thief, as proof that I was somehow deliberately attempting to poison her.
I did not want to hurt her! I wanted her to see the labels and all that, go ‘hey, I’m allergic to peanuts and I know there’s peanuts in that’ and leave it the heck alone!
Anyway, that messed up my career, and now I work for about the same amount of money doing warehouse work because no one else in the industry will hire me anymore. I should never have taken that position in the first place.
Last I heard she was still working there.
