Pickling Your Way Out Of A Pickle

I use to manage a bunch of programmers, though I’m not one myself. I mostly worked to protect them from our customers, vet and filter requests down to them, and basically do my best to ensure they could focus on their job. They did quite a good job of managing the technical parts themselves.

One of my programmers was absurdly cheap. [Programmer] would eat dry, non-name-brand bagels every day for lunch, with the occasional “splurge” of some knock-off condensed soup. He got some good-natured teasing from the team for his cheapness, though he probably mocked his own cheapness more than anyone else. Since his cheapness was primarily so he could save more money to donate to charity, we couldn’t really fault him for it.

While I tried to shield my team from time-wasting meetings, we did have a group one every other month. As compensation for wasting their time with a meeting, I would buy food from one of the local fast food joints for everyone to eat during the meeting. [Programmer] refused to order when everyone else did, claiming that since he knew he would never be buying food for anyone in the office, owing to his cheapness, he didn’t want to mooch off of any of us. I tried to point out that I was paying for the team and didn’t expect him to repay me, but he still insisted on showing up to the meeting with his dry bagels while everyone else had a real meal.

Then, one day, through some sort of mix-up, we ended up receiving far more pickles than we needed with the meal order, more than anyone could eat.

Programmer: “I hate pickles, but I can’t stand to see food get thrown out! Please don’t throw the extras out.”

And he started eating one even as he clearly loathed them and looked like he wanted to gag.

I’ll confess the team had a little fun with this, taunting him with the threat of pickles being thrown out to pressure him into eating more pickles and laughing at the look of disgust on his face. The programmer was good-natured about it and didn’t seem to mind some friendly teasing, and in the end, he managed to eat a bag full of pickles all by himself.

This gave me an idea, though. At the next team meeting, after collecting everyone’s orders, I added one extra meal to the list. I then happily informed my frugal friend that I had an extra meal I planned to throw out if he didn’t eat it. Despite his jokingly complaining that he was being forced to eat under duress, it worked; he accepted the extra meal rather than see it go to waste.

From then until the day our contract ended, I would buy random meals for him each meeting and “force” him to eat with us via the threat of throwing it out otherwise. He never did admit defeat and start ordering the meals he wanted, though, so I had fun having him try every meal option I could find. Only once, a few days before April 1st, did that meal come with extra pickles.