One on my favorite places to work was a company that boasted as having a cafeteria. It seems to be a thing of the past now days when a company will go to all the expense to have an in-house eating area for their workers. You might think that companies that have one are trying to keep their employees happy. That may be true of some, but not the one I worked for.
In the old days at school, the cafeteria was a place to buy breakfast lunch. In the working environment, it’s more of a place to check out your co-workers: who’s hot and who’s definitely not, who sits with whom and how they behave away from the office environment. Unfortunately, our cafeteria was a bit on the skanky side. They served up recycled tuna and chicken and their specialty was to make ‘creative soups’ from leftovers of two days ago. It was also full of very tempting and gratifying deserts such as chocolate mud cakes and humongous chocolate chip cookies.
Not only did my coworkers brave the food there but some of the upper management did as well…for a time. When the place was new, everyone checked it out. Not long after, the upper management guys stopped coming downstairs to eat. It didn’t take me long to realize that they only put the cafeteria in to make sure we stay in the building and to be as efficient as possible, eat out of a Styrofoam box and eat in our cubicle.
The upside was that at least the cafeteria staff knew us all by name, knew what we did, what we liked on our sandwiches and unlike some in the company, these people were actually doing their jobs.
