The breakroom in my office at SLAC is a place fraught with spilled coffee, the CERN Courier (the magazine of our over-shadowing and vastly superior big-brother of an accelerator), and conversations with people who don’t want to go back to work and will thus trap you forever with continued chatter. It can be a dark place regardless of the full-length windows, which incidentally look right out over the parking lot so people can tell when you get to work and when you leave.  Dang it.

People will sometimes leave extra food/snacks/desserts in the breakroom that are up for grabs, and just today there was a bag of freshly picked lemons waiting for me as I went to fill up my water bottle this morning.  But alas–as I was filling the bottle and daydreaming about some fresh lemon slices in my water, another lady walked into the breakroom, saw the lemons, and proceeded to grab the entire bag and walk away.  There must have been twenty lemons in there.  What is she going to do with all those lemons?!  There has to be some universal moral rule about taking more than one free piece of food from the breakroom.  I haven’t actually seen this particular lady in my building before, but she will henceforth be known as the Lemon Thief.  I will keep you updated if she makes a reappearance.

Some other questionable behavior I’ve come across in the breakroom:

  • Microwaving your pasta for six whole minutes while other people are clearly waiting to hear up lunch.  It really doesn’t need to be that hot.  I hope you burned your tongue.
  • Taking up a bunch of space in the fridge with a whole freakin’ shopping bag full of food.  You can store your lunch for the week at home and leave some space for the rest of us.
  • Letting the drain on the espresso machine get so full that it overflows.  There’s a little red float thingy that tells you when it’s time to dump the extra water, and if you wait longer it spills all over your pants when you try to drain it and of course it’s right before an important meeting and I don’t even drink coffee I was just trying to be a good person and now I have wet pants.  This sucks.