Susan's Scribblings the Blog

This week my office had food brought in two days in a row. I picked a bad week to start my diet. There is never a good week, because food is an evil you cannot totally exorcise from your life, and it’s everywhere. At office events, it often finds itself in your face for eight straight hours. Eventually it winds up in your gut and turns into astronomical numbers on your bathroom scale.

Contact centers (or phone banks, if you will) are sitting job parking lots and hotbeds of obesity. Workers are tethered to their cubicles receiving phone calls, and not all of them are from happy people. When you get a break, you pee and eat. That’s probably written in the guidebook of contact center life somewhere. Until we can take customer phone calls and walk 10,000 steps at the same time, that’s just how it is.

Our company has been encouraging camaraderie by having a monthly themed event (the theme named by committee) every Tuesday, and this month’s happened to fall on the same Tuesday as a sales commission event, which also is primed and pumped regularly by the delivery of food. We moved our event to Wednesday, which explains the abundance of food in my office for two straight days.

Our themed event for Wednesday had a patriotic theme and included hot dogs. For the Tuesday event, we had Italian food delivered by a fine establishment about ten minutes away. They came with huge trays of baked ziti and chicken parmesan, warm inviting loaves of garlic bread and enough salad that, even if only the vegetarians were working that day, they would have been ecstatic. My diet told me to behave myself, so I did.

Unfortunately we had seriously over-ordered for the event, and when the afternoon delivery came for the next shift, we looked like a Vegas buffet with a mile of food wafting the sweet smells of cheese and tomatoes and garlic around the department. When I left at 5:00, we could still have fed an army of Minions.

The next day, somebody broke the news to me that some of the food was wasted after the night was over, and that a fridge on the next floor is almost always empty and it could have been used to store the leftovers. They did salvage the salad. It went over like the holy grail of salad with the hot dogs, especially for the vegetarians. In fact, all the food was well received and consumed with gusto.

I caved and ate. It’s bad enough to be seated in a corner away from the general population and separated by a huge wall right out of “Game of Thrones,” but when people don’t see you participating, they tend to forget you exist or that you are human.

So I’m trying to make up for it the rest of the week by not eating like a human and trying to forget that I have a sitting job. Sure would’ve liked to try that chicken parmesan, though.