Lunch Wars Defending Your Sandwich Citadel
My manager keeps scheduling meetings during lunch and expects everyone to attend. How do I push back without risking my job?
Lunch-Leashing-Losing-Job,
Sacred Sandwich Sentinel
Lunch is sacred ground, kid. Anyone who carpets a meeting over it has declared a tiny, greasy war. Treat it like they parked on your tongue.
You do not skip the meeting; you colonize it with your lunch. Enter on camera with a plate that has topography and a fork that rings like a courtroom bell. Speak in the calm voice of a saint and mention you are observing your “Hour of Chew”.
Eat loudly but righteously. Carrots that crack like ice, soup that sings, wrappers that sound like distant thunder. Every time the manager starts a sentence, take a slow bite and nod as if their agenda is the garnish.
Weaponize logistics until they drown in napkins. Ask if the deck has a lactose-safe slide, a condiment appendix, and a mandated two-minute chewing interval. Flood the chat with sandwich emojis until the timestamps look breaded.
On the calendar, build a wall. Set a recurring hold named Chew Block in the most aggressive color, then accept their invite and stack your hold directly on top like armor plating. If they try to move it, reply that your stomach has already signed the contract.
Recruit a quiet cabal of lunch absolutists. Synchronize a 12:07 community crunch so the meeting hits an edible thunderclap, then have someone gently ask whether this is a working lunch or a lunch working them. Petty is a choir; sing in key.
Bring food that changes the weather. Microwave fish, peel oranges, build a salad with croutons the size of regret, and narrate your seasoning as if it were a quarterly metric. Explain that best practices require “audible verification of chewing”.
If they complain, apologize with the confidence of a sainted villain and double down. Say you will not eat on camera next time because you will be eating louder off camera, and you trust their leadership to schedule around human metabolism. They step on lunch, you turn lunch into terrain, and watch how fast their calendar finds religion.
– Uncle Bobby