To You, Who Stole My Lunch

I'm sure you'll never read this. You don't even know who I am, and I don't know you. I caught a quick glimpse of you as I was entering the break room, when you were exiting with your Pretzel Bread Lean Pocket. I thought, how curious, someone else at work today brought the exact same thing I did for lunch. Then, upon looking in the freezer to grab my Lean Pocket and heat it up, I find that it's nowhere to be found. Not where I put it, not anywhere. I do a double-take, then a triple-take in the direction of the lady who just left. That wasn't her Pretzel Bread Lean Pocket; it was mine!

A plethora of emotions rush through me: anger, confusion, frustration, disappointment, and the like. I'm angry because that lady just stole my lunch. Confused as to why, of all the frozen dinners in the freezer, she would decide to take mine – did it really look that appealing? Frustrated that now I have to go back upstairs to my office (across the building, I might add), get some money out of my wallet, and traipse back to the break room to buy something else for lunch. Disappointed because, as paranoid as I can sometimes be, I do think of myself as a trusting person. I like to think that most people, given the chance, will do the right thing more often than they will do the wrong thing. But I am wrong. I often am in this respect.

Couple this Friday fiasco with the fact that this week alone we have had a power window on our van to cease functioning, leaving our driver's side window – at least temporarily – ever-ready for drive-thru ordering; we have both had more than our share of pressures at work of late (me because of pending deadlines which seem insurmountable, and Mary because it's almost the end of the school year, and that's always a crazy time); neither of us is sleeping well or enough for various reasons, not the least of which is stress; and oh, did I mention, our other car's brakes and air-conditioning are also on the way out. (We really need to invest some money into decent transportation.) So, needless to say, this heisted Lean Pocket incident was not the impetus for the aforementioned emotion rush so much as it was the proverbial camel's-back-breaking straw. But I digress.

Back to you, lady, the one who took my Lean Pocket. I don't what your reasons might have been. Maybe you were hungry and you didn't have any money for food (although it is payday Friday). Maybe you forgot to bring your lunch this morning and it was an opportunistic thievery. Or maybe you're just a mean person who likes to do mean things to people you don't even know. I don't know.

If you really wanted my lunch, or if you really needed it, I would have gladly given it to you, even though I have no clue who you are. But please ask me next time, don't just take it. That's just incredibly rude!



ADDENDUM:  To you, who pulled half in and half out of the turn lane on Evans and 10th around 1:30 this afternoon, holding up traffic in my lane for what seemed like an eternity, but was, in reality, probably no more than a minute at most:  I'm sorry I called you an idiot. You may or may not have deserved it, but I didn't need to say it. That was incredibly rude, too. I apologize.