Tired of stolen lunches, employee booby-trapped his food with one ingredient his coworker couldn't eat. The result was glorious

On April 1, an employee (u/crystal_butterflyyx) shared a concerning workplace dilemma: lunch theft. "Someone at my job has been stealing my lunch out of the communal fridge for weeks. I'm not guessing. I know exactly who it is." The incident began unfolding about two months ago when a new colleague joined his office. The fiasco is now making office-goers wonder whether they should put a padlock on their lunchboxes.

Workplace lunch theft is more common than one may imagine. A 2017 survey found that 18 percent of workers admitted to eating someone else’s lunch from the office fridge, per Business Wire. This means nearly one in five people sitting in your office meeting could be secretly plotting the next grand theft to be executed during lunch break.

Due to religious reasons, the worker mentioned that he was following a strict diet, which left him with limited meal options. For weeks, his lunch had mysteriously vanished from the communal fridge, as if a food fairy had snagged it when no one was looking. He knew that it was that co-worker, given that he too followed similar dietary restrictions due to religious reasons. It wasn’t too difficult to connect the dots.

Every time his lunch disappeared, that colleague would sit at his desk, eating “something that looked suspiciously like” what was packed in his lunch. After lunch was gone, he had no choice but to remain hungry for the rest of the day. Twice, he attempted to talk to the guy, understand the issue, and reconcile. The guy, however, denied the theft altogether while pretending to be confused about the whole thing. So he surrendered as the victim of this loot and continued day after day, not eating.

Then one fine day came a twist of fate, an opportunity for him to turn the tables. The other night, his partner had cooked something for dinner whose leftovers were still in the fridge. He packed the leftovers in the office lunchbox and placed it in the communal fridge in a ridiculously innocent way, knowing very well that it contained an ingredient that his co-worker couldn’t eat. He “booby trapped his own lunch” to catch the culprit.

Come lunchtime, and his lunch vanished as per the routine, and he caught the co-worker eating it. Instead of accusing the perpetrator or wringing out the truth from his mouth, he simply told him that the meal he was eating contained an ingredient that wasn’t a part of his restricted diet. In what was the righteous retribution for his crime, the infuriated co-worker responded with indignation and yelling. The thief blamed the employee for doing this on purpose.

The aggravated colleague marched into HR’s office and spewed the tale. The HR rose to the employee’s defense and clarified that stealing someone’s lunch is an act of privacy violation, and he had "zero obligations" to reveal the ingredients.

Readers stood up for the employee and flooded the comments section with supportive remarks while calling out the hypocrisy of the co-worker. “He wasn’t trapped — he was caught in the act of being a hypocrite,” said u/Mochi_meow_meringue. In the end, the scores were settled. The lunch thief was trapped in his own game, and the employee was now free to enjoy his lunch without any fear whatsoever. “I didn’t set anyone up,” he said, referring to the suspect. “Every consequence that followed came from that choice. Not mine.”

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