Heroic IT Dept Less Likely to Steal... Lunches?

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in the Houston Chronicle concerning lunch theft, people from IT are least likely to steal lunches because they are a "hero department." The most likely? Accounting and Customer-Support... "

What kind of lunch?

[PhrostyMcByte]

If you want the IT guys to steal lunch, you've got to bait them with something caffeinated and something sugary. Try some Bawls, Mt. Dew, and Skittles.

Re:Steal?

[bensafrickingenius]

We're supposed to pay $0.25 per cup for coffee at work. I only pay for maybe 1 cup in 20. Of course, I guess I can be hero, because I'm stealing from The Man and not my coworkers, right?

Unfortunately....

[arth1]

Unfortunately, I'm certain that if I made a special lunch sandwich with razorblades, and some bastard stole it and hurt himself, the police would come after me.

What I really want to know is who the fucker is who deliberately pees all over the toilet seat and floor at work. I know people might hate their job and feel frustration, but is there any reason to take it out on everybody else?

Regards,
--
*Art

Also...

[Poromenos1]

Also because the higher-ups are used to stealing!

Thank you, I'll be here for a bit.

Wait a minute...

[RealGrouchy]

...are you saying that IT workers are allowed to eat lunches?

That changes everything...

- RG>

please, less science, more fluff

[MolecularBear]

I am getting sick of all these incomprehensibly esoteric articles. I like science, but sometimes the posts on slashdot are just too technical for me. This article on stealing lunches is a case in point. The pages and pages of analyses, the incredibly detailed social models that they used to arrive at their conclusions, the dogs eating lunches... it's a bit much for the layperson to grasp in one sitting. Editors: could we please get something a little lighter next time?

Re:please, less science, more fluff

[AsmCoder8088]

Try digg if you want a watered-down version.

Re:Steal?

[Millenniumman]

Oh yeah? I have to grow the coffee myself, then pick it. Then I grind it with a stone, put it in a bowl (hewn from stone) with water (reclaimed from the air and heated on servers) and I filter it with old AC filters. Then coworkers usually steal the coffee.

Re:muffins

[foniksonik]

That's cause a hungry baby has lots of supporters waiting nearby to feed it with their own portion rather than see it go hungry, whereas the CFO has little or no supporters and must fend for himself or die.

I confess to using the cat food trick too...

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Some jackass kept stealing my tuna sandwich...I mean once in a while would still be annoying, but EVERY damn time was just an open declaration of war. So I made a big fat tuna sandwich with a healthy amount of "FancyFeast". I used chicken and liver flavor to make sure the point got across. So in the fridge it goes and I came back an hour or two later and it was gone. The next morning, I found an anonymous post-it note on the door of the fridge asking people to please discard "old and potentially rancid" food from the refigerator since it was a "health hazard."

Since then, my sandwich has been safe. Nobody ever owned up to the thefts or the note. :)

You had water?!?

[A nonymous Coward]

Back in my day, we had to smash hydrogen and oxygen atoms together to make our own water. Then some high mucketity-muck would come along and steal it. We tried substituting deuterium and tritium instead of hydrogen but they never did steal enough to self-destruct.

Dye...

[HairyCanary]

After the last time my lunch was stolen out of the break room fridge, I thought that perhaps next time I would put in a bit of bait food that was laced with blue dye. Food coloring, of course, so it would be harmless. Then for the next couple of days at work we could all easily identify the lunch thief by the blue stains around his mouth. LOL.

Haven't tried it yet, though.

Re:Unfortunately....

[Anonymous Coward]

His name is Jerry. He's a sales guy.

(I'm serious, we have, sadly enough, witnesses.)

Re:You had water?!?

[dvice_null]

You had oxygen?!

Re:Steal my lunch

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just use the scarecrow technique. Just put the brownies -- no exlax, no poison, just plain brownies -- in there and attach a sticker to them: "WARNING: one of this brownies contains cianide." I guess nobody would have the guts to try and guess if the warning was true.

Unfortunately, there is a countermeasure to it. Someone else could attach another label to your snack: "WARNING: there are now TWO brownies with cianide."

Stealing? How DARE YOU?

[Lead Butthead]

Being able to steal a hungry baby's food without any remorse would probably be considered a useful trait for a CFO.

Stealing? That's not stealing. That's ... unsolicited ownership transfer.

The Mad ...

[triso]

What I really want to know is who the fucker is who deliberately pees all over the toilet seat and floor at work. I know people might hate their job and feel frustration, but is there any reason to take it out on everybody else?

Be thankful you don't have The Mad Shitter [poopreport.com] or Another Mad Shitter [sneakyfrog.com] to deal with.

Re:You had water?!?

[brusk]

You had atoms? We had to make all our own subatomic particles from quarks--and we didn't have any leptons!

Re:I confess to using the cat food trick too...

[runningduck]

I myself never put food in the community fridge, but many others had been complaining about missing food items. I thought I would help out all the poor souls so one day I put catfood in all the lunches to teach that stealing bugger a lesson. I think it worked because the complaining stopped.

The true motivator...

[tm2b]

It's just that IT departments tend to have the highest percentage of employees who remember being beaten up and having their lunch money taken from them!

Re:You had water?!?

[WilliamSChips]

You had quarks? We had to make our own quarks from preons!

Re:Unfortunately....

[MoeDrippins]

> Unfortunately, I'm certain that if I made a special lunch sandwich with razorblades, and some bastard stole it and hurt himself, the police would come after me.

Yeah, our law enforcement has gone totally insane to prosecute you for something like that.

Re:WTF?

[subl33t]

"I want that 2 minutes of my life back."

You post to your /. journal at 3am on a Friday and you want 2 minutes of your life back?

no.

How to fix stealing from the public fridge

[polyex]

We had a problem with stealing food at work, someone was stealing this guys apple, orange, etc. Whatever fruit he had brought for lunch and left in the fridge went missing. So after a few emails asking that the thief stop went unheeded, we simply sent an email informing the last fruit stolen had spent the night before in mens urinal. That stopped the stealing cold.

Right...

[Marsala]

I can't even trust you people to type in your password without forgetting to turn off capslock, and now I'm supposed to trust with you something like food prep?

I don't think so, Tim.

Re:Unfortunately....

[UncleFluffy]

Unfortunately, I'm certain that if I made a special lunch sandwich with razorblades, and some bastard stole it and hurt himself, the police would come after me.

However, in my experience, an extremely over-salted sandwich together with an orange-juice carton full of dirty dishwater works extremely well.

Re:There is a better way...

[Sponge Bath]

...and soak just about everything in Jalapeños

Use both laxative and Jalapenos,
and replace the toilet paper in the bathroom with rabid gerbils.

Few things are as painful as wiping your burning anus with a rabid gerbil.

IT Departments may not steal lunches...

[ElboRuum]

Within the realm of probability, IT is least likely to steal your lunch, however, I have reasonably good sources confirming, AS WE SPEAK, that IT is the most likely to shake people down for milk money. Where are the hall monitors when you need them? Unscheduled bathroom breaks and they're ALL OVER YOU. Some real crime going down and you can hear crickets chirping.

Re:You had water?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

You had preons? We had to disassemble Higgs bosons and build our own preons from those!

i'm not breaking a fifty for a fucking bagel!

[weierstrass]

maybe they didn't have any change

Heros?????

[Quiet_Desperation]

We have to regularly lynch a random member of our IT department as a message to the rest to keep those Microsoft-loving bastards in line. We used to put their heads on pikes but the county health inspector told us to quit it.

Re:There is a better way...

[johnw]

Few things are as painful as wiping your burning anus with a rabid gerbil.

I'll take your word for it.

Re:What kind of lunch?

[geminidomino]

I tried that. My pancreas leapt out through my belly button, kicked me in the balls, and called a lawyer.

Thanks a lot!

Re:muffins

[zacronos]

I find your ideas interesting and think you should subscribe to my newsletter.

Re:Mr Yuk the Lunch Guardian

[Sagachi]

Now I just put the Mr Yuk on my cans and lunch bags and noone dares touch them in the staff fridge.

That's a really good idea. You could even go a step further and use a skull-and-crossbones. Then everyone would think your lunch was owned by a pirate. Nobody wants to mess with pirates.

Re:muffins

[VShael]

Ultimately, it's high time the incompetent 80% that's had a free ride to date either got with the program, or got cut off from the rest of the productive members of society. Perhaps some sort of giant space-ark is in order? (with apologies to D. Adams)