Who RAISED You?!

Working as help desk tech support for a company with over 30,000 stores they support across the US and some internationally means that we have to have the help desk open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There is zero downtime for the help desk.

I and four others — five others if you include the supervisor on duty — are tasked with working Thanksgiving Day. The day isn’t busy, but we need enough people to cover the calls, and our hours overlap by a few. The shifts are staggered to make sure someone is available to answer calls at any given time. Call volume on Thanksgiving is pretty low until businesses are getting prepared for Black Friday, so managers are coming into work on Thanksgiving anytime after 5:00 pm so they can set up. 

Before things are expected to start getting busy, the supervisor, unbeknownst to the guys working, sets up a local restaurant to make three full turkeys and tons of sides. He goes and picks everything up around 3:00 pm and brings the food back so all of us can have a Thanksgiving dinner since we were stuck at work and probably missing out on the real thing at home. It is an awesome gesture. He also sets up some of the TV screens around the room to run the football games.

The employee taking the 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm shift is a guy with a big appetite. Everyone notices that when free food is brought for the employees, [Coworker] isn’t shy about taking his fill plus enough for four other people.

The manager comes in with all this food and starts setting up the table with plates and utensils and laying out the food. We take turns dishing ourselves and go back to our desks to eat while we mindlessly watch the football game that’s running on a wall-mounted TV, since there are essentially no calls coming in throughout the day. Four of us (the manager, two other techs, and me) have made it through about one turkey and about a quarter of the sides. Then, the [Coworker] comes over to get his food.

He takes one full turkey back to his desk, sets it down, and comes back to the table to grab one of the stuffing side dishes that is about half-full — this side dish container holds four servings when full — and he loads up the other half with mashed potatoes and dumps the whole container of gravy all over it. He then returns to his desk to sit down and eat, like the rest of us. However, he does not take any utensils with him. He sits there scooping gravy-soaked mashed potatoes and stuffing into his mouth with one hand and working on peeling meat from the full turkey with his other hand. He doesn’t have any napkins with him, so as he takes a call that comes in, he just types away on his keyboard with nasty gravy-covered fingers and turkey juices dripping all over his equipment.

The sight of him stuffing his face with his hands and not cleaning them off and using his keyboard, mouse, phone, and headset is enough to turn my stomach. I make it through maybe half of my plate, but after seeing [Coworker] eat, I’m not hungry anymore, and neither are the other guys. 

That is the last time free food is brought in for the staff [Coworker] is working. It isn’t the first time the guy has made a spectacle of himself; the last time pizza was brought in, he took two whole large pizzas for himself. Human Resources spoke to him about his behavior and his eating habits when food is brought in for everyone, but clearly, it didn’t change anything. So, the last option is to not bring in food for the employees when he is on duty.