“When I first started working I would work late a lot, and I would forget to bring extra food and drinks, so I would just take a soda here and there,” he tells me. (And where, he says, the salaries were high enough he was never actually hungry.) It started with cans of soda. Before that, though, he worked in various large, corporate offices, where large, shared refrigerators made it easy to steal without repercussion. Incidentally, that is about the amount of time he has worked from home. Rob hasn’t stolen a lunch in two years, he tells me. Together we decided there are probably enough programmers in their 40s named Rob that divulging this amount of personal information was okay. His name is Rob, and he’s a programmer in his early 40s. Eventually he agreed to speak with me, and we arranged a phone call. Unfortunately, most relevant postings I found were from, like, four years ago, and again it seemed no one would come forward. I told them I was a reporter, and asked if they’d be willing to elaborate on their experiences in lunch theft. On Reddit, I found a few lunch theft discussion threads, and messaged about 15 or 20 users who indicated that they had stolen, or would steal, lunch from a co-worker, several of whom sounded very pleased with themselves. I was very nearly too dejected to continue my search when I remembered: Reddit. I even made a Google Form about it, and nobody filled out my Google Form. I asked Twitter, where many people expressed outrage over the very idea of lunch theft, but again, no actual thieves surfaced.

First, I offered my own office lunch thief immunity (or, well, anonymity) if they came forward to tell me their life story, but nobody took me up on it. To find out, I had to identify one such person.

Collectively, and publicly - all wanting to make very clear that we were innocent - my colleagues and I wondered: who does this? What kind of person steals lunch from people they work with, and why? But then, just when you thought it was safe to leave an Amy’s frozen burrito in the shared fridge for 12 days, the lunch thief struck again. The authorities sent out slightly mean emails about how we’re all adults here, and even those of us who didn’t do anything wrong were embarrassed. What’s happened since has followed a trajectory sure to be familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in an office with more than, say, 30 employees: a menacing, all-caps Post-It note was posted, instructing the thief: “PLEASE DO NOT TAKE FOOD THAT DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU.” The appropriate authorities were alerted. For the past month or two, my place of work (this very website) has been plagued by a relatively harmless but deeply mystifying figure: the phantom lunch thief.

Dinner thief meaning