My coworker has appointed himself project manager of our team's lunch orders.
By @paigelol · Work
He's created a shared spreadsheet with pivot tables and is now scheduling 'alignment meetings' to finalize sandwich choices. I just want to be able to decide I want a turkey sub without a 24-hour lead time.
The full story
Our office has a pretty casual culture, or at least it did. For years, the lunch system has been simple: around 11:30, someone says they're going to the deli and a flurry of requests get shouted across the cubicles. Simple, effective, beautifully chaotic. That all ended a month ago. My coworker—let’s call him the Lunch Czar—decided this system was inefficient. He announced in a team meeting (an actual meeting, with a deck) that he would be streamlining the lunch procurement process. At first, it was a joke. We all chuckled when he sent around a a place nearby Form. But it wasn't a joke. The form now links to a master spreadsheet that tracks everyone's past orders, calculates cost-per-person averages, and even has a 'Veto' column. Last week he implemented drop-down menus for bread choices because someone requested 'sourdough' which isn't a standard option at our preferred place, creating a 'data anomaly.' Yesterday was the breaking point. He scheduled a 15-minute mandatory meeting titled "Q2 Lunch Logistics & Condiment Strategy." The agenda item was that too many people were requesting custom orders, which was reducing our bulk discount eligibility. He proposed we vote on a standard sandwich for each day of the week. My manager, who just wants to avoid conflict, told him it was a 'great display of initiative.' I feel like I'm losing my mind. It's just lunch. It's the one part of the day that isn't supposed to be optimized and tracked and turned into a KPI. I’m seriously considering just bringing a sad desk salad every day to opt-out of this bureaucratic nightmare, but I know it would require filling out an 'Order Exclusion' request on the spreadsheet and probably a one-on-one a to discuss my rationale for leaving the program. Is this just what corporate life is? Is this my future? Performance reviews about my choice of cheese?
How people voted
- Bad Move — 28% (11 votes)
- Needs Context — 53% (21 votes)
- Reasonable — 20% (8 votes)
Readers say “Needs Context” (53%) — 40 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@claireb — I would start requesting items with emojis in the spreadsheet just to see what happens to his pivot tables.
@hanky — This is a classic corporate power trip manifesting in the most pathetic way possible.
@lowkeyawkward — Soft.
@niakk — Why doesn’t your manager just tell him to knock it off?
@paigelol — lmaooo
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