Feminist Lunch

I work at a company that offers free lunch as a perk.  It's great; we order what we want from a list of local restaurants in the morning, and it arrives later in the general time window commonly known as of lunch.  Mostly.  There's one little hang-up: for some inexplicable reason, people have a tendency to take other people's lunches without asking.

Everyone has the option of ordering food for themselves.  There is also a bountiful supply of other foods that are constantly in stock, like ramen, granola bars, and even fresh salads.  I can't imagine why anyone needs to take a lunch someone else ordered, but it happens all the time.  This week it happened to me three days in a row.  On the third day I ordered two lunches so that when one was stolen I'd still have one left.  Both were stolen.

Along with the tradition of taking lunches goes the tradition of writing an office-wide email condemning the taking of lunches.  After three days in a row, I decided it was time to honor that tradition.  I sent what I thought was a rather pleasant email to the office explaining my situation and suggesting the obvious alternatives to stealing my lunch a fourth time.

The responses to my email were mostly commiseration and statements of supportive dismay, but I also got a few others.  A couple of people replied to say that engineers are just like that; they're hungry and just can't help themselves.  A few replied that it was my own fault for not claiming my lunch more promptly.  I even got one response that suggested I was overreacting; it's much more likely that the lunches just weren't delivered.  From three different restaurants.  Three days in a row.

The men reading this right now are probably thinking to themselves, "so what?"  The women, however, way recognized my experience as another flavor of the same crap they put up with on a daily basis.  Full disclosure: I'm male.  I consider myself a feminist, and I'm well aware of the struggle that women, especially women in tech, face in trying to be heard, trying to be treated fairly.  Until this lunch theft email thread, though, I didn't understand.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not pretending that a handful of emails about a stolen lunch is anywhere close to the magnitude of mistreatment that women have come to see as the usual cost of existing.  But for me it was an interesting glimpse into how it feels to be discounted, diminished, and mansplained to in a situation where I was clearly wronged.

Also interesting to note is that two people reached out over instant messenger to offer emotional support.  Both were women.