Office employees would know the infuriating feeling of seeing their lunch stolen from the fridge. It can be more frustrating if it’s a repeat offense where you don’t know who the perpetrator is.
Because HR complaints won’t always suffice, some people take matters into their own hands. Sometimes, it may work in their favor, but for this pregnant employee, it backfired.
She received a warning from her bosses after her lunch “decoy” sent someone to the hospital, all while her food theft problem remained unaddressed. Read the entire story below.
Having lunch stolen from the office fridge can be utterly frustrating for an employee
Image credits: Kevin Malik/Pexels (not the actual photo)
It was a worse experience for this pregnant woman, who dealt with a repeat offender
Image credits: Drazen Zigic/Freepik (not the actual photo)
She took matters into her own hands, only for her actions to backfire big time
Image credits: Ok_Breadfruit_4935
“Everyone has a rule they feel they can violate”
Image credits: KamranAydinov/Freepik (not the actual photo)
We’ve all violated a rule in some way, whether by running a red light or pocketing a piece of candy from the store. It’s just that some people believe they can get away with such behavior without facing consequences.
“Everybody’s got something they do that they can justify and feel is okay,” University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Dr. Art Markman told The Cut. “There’s always some rule that you personally feel you can violate.”
As Dr. Markman explains, it all comes down to a fundamental attribution error. This cognitive bias leads people to make overblown judgments about other people’s actions while underplaying their own errors.
“Most people want to generally go around seeing themselves as being honest, good folks,” he states, adding that when it comes to office lunches, most people resort to whatever is convenient. In the author’s case, her food may have been the most appealing to steal.
However, this doesn’t change the fact that it is thievery, which is never ethical. In such cases, the onus is on human resources to enforce rules and educate employees about possible sanctions.
“Make it clear that any theft is a violation of your company’s policy and that disciplinary action will be taken when employees are caught,” HR Knowledge Advisor Victoria Neal wrote in an article for SHRM.
Neal emphasizes that these disciplinary actions also apply to “would-be vigilantes” who engage in food pranks as the author did. Instead, she encourages reporting these incidents to a supervisor or through an anonymous channel.
Based on her account, the author didn’t seem like she tried to go through the proper steps by escalating the matter to the people in authority first, perhaps out of sheer frustration. However, her actions would easily have had fatal consequences.
If reporting to HR wasn’t an option for her, hiding her food would have been a better, more harmless way to prevent theft.
Many commenters didn’t see anything wrong with her actions
But there were a few who saw the gravity of the consequences
