Office Rule #71: Avoid Office Potlucks

If an office potluck meeting notice ever comes your way, heed my advice: don’t bother bringing anything. We recently had a Thanksgiving potluck in our office. (Which is basically our bosses way of saying they’re too cheap to treat us to lunch, so they will just help themselves to the fruits of our labors and don’t have to expense so much as a plastic fork.)

Fortunately, my office is full of moms and grandmas whose second favorite thing, after slaving away in a windowless cube pouring over computer print-outs, is cooking. Not so fortunate though, is that fact that for as many moms and grandmas in our midst, there are an equal number of clueless men and young people, who don’t have a strong grasp of any meal that doesn’t require microwaving. So along with all the nice, homemade goodies on display at our potluck, were the random, store-bought, plastic trays of grocery store foods. We had a 20 pound turkey, a slow-cooked ham, and a tray of store-bought sushi. (Did the Pilgrims bring sushi?) We had home made pasta salad, mashed potatoes from scratch, and a platter of frozen shrimp cocktail from Vons. Then, there were homemade brownies next to Chinese noodles from the take out place down the street.

The randomness of the food made my stomach queezy by the end. And not only are there so many types of food, there’s so much of it! Apparently, while cooking, each person thought theirs would be the only side dish. We had enough to feed our entire company. We invited random strangers in from the street. The Fedex guy who happened to deliver a package during the potluck was sent home with a doggy bag.

And of course you’re forced to try everything. If, heaven forbid, you scoot by the stale-looking pink sugar cookies with the price tag still on them, there will inevitable be someone from billing screeching at you, “Hey, didn’t you try the cookies I brought?!” So my plate became a rainbow of colors, a clash of ethnic foods, a massive pile of slop.

I paid the price by having my stomach rebel against everything for two days, and I subsisted on soup and toast before my stomach would ever trust me to eat real food again. When people asked me why I wasn’t eating much, I had to tell the strange truth: “Oh I got a little sick from Thanksgiving dinner. That spicy tuna roll didn’t go down so well.”