The Sneaky Peeky Lunchtime Thiefy

Earlier this week, Mike made me a delicious burrito with rice, refried beans, fried zucchini, and carmelized onions. Wow, was it ever good. I put it in a glass container and took it to work. It was a huge burrito, and I only ate half of it. The next day, wanting to prolong the enjoyment of this savory treat, I only ate a few bites with my salad and saved the remaining 3rd for the next day.

When I went to get the burrito out of the fridge, I noticed a glass container identical to mine sitting on the kitchen counter at work, cleaned and dried. “Cool," I thought. "Someone has the same dish.” But realization slowly dawned that it was MY container when I couldn’t find my burrito in the fridge.

I was so puzzled. Did someone think I didn’t want it? I had obviously wrapped it up and put it back in the glass container. There aren’t any self-appointed lunch monitors who routinely tidy out the fridge, so I don’t think anyone went on a cleaning binge and threw it away. Since I’d already eaten most of it and left my fork in the container, I couldn’t fathom that anyone would mistake it for theirs.

I was bemoaning the loss of the burrito and all its yumminess to another doctor and nurse who were there. The nurse said, “That’s weird, because last week I brought an entire pizza and left it in the fridge and when I went back at lunch, I found that someone had eaten all the pepperoni on top and left the rest of the pizza.”

Hmmmm…the plot thickens.

Then the doctor told how awhile back she had brought a sack with an apple, a container of Jell-o, and a segmented Tupperware container with rice, vegetables, salad, and dessert. When she went back, she noticed her apple and Jell-o were missing. She opened up the Tupperware container only to find that exactly half of each food item had been eaten and the other half left behind. She ended up throwing her entire lunch, Tupperware and all, in the trash.

So what we have here is a lunchtime thief with a freaky food fetish. We hypothesize that it’s all being done by the same person, because the eating pattern is so bizarre that we’d hate to think there’s more than one mealtime bandit partially eating others’ food. There's part of me who wants to go all sleuthy and figure this out by setting up a Nanny Cam, but the Army might have a problem with one of their soldiers drilling holes in the walls willy-nilly.

I guess I’m just glad that this individual very kindly washed and dried my dish and left it for me to find (I'm sure the "thank you" note was misplaced), but I’ll sure think twice before bringing food to work again.