...If there's one thing that my co-workers have learned it is this:

You can say almost anything around me because I am not offended or insulted that easily, and you can play all the pranks that you want, but you never ever mess with my food. Or lunchtime. Or tease me about food.

I mark that up and cruel and unusual punishment and nothing will get me in a bad mood faster than messing around with meals.

So, the other way we're working hard and we get the suggestion from the boss that maybe we should start cleaning up the office before the VC's show up for a big meeting later. It's about two hours before they are slated to show up. That's when I notice the time and mention that maybe we should get our lunch so that we've eaten and cleaned up before they get here. And honestly, when you visit a company it's so much better when it doesn't smell like lunch when you're not being fed.

So, we start deciding among ourselves where to get food from. Meanwhile, we're being put under the gun for various things for the meeting. The coders (M, B & A) have to keep going on an update and M has an appointment to head to, the senior developer (P) has to finish his presentation, the senior product manager (G) has to finish getting the site back online after the credit card processor went down, and I had to finish gathering some historical to-date data on users and orders. The only person who wasn't required to do anything was O. You remember O? O was the one that implied that I am old a few weeks ago.

P can't go pick up food. I can't go pick up food (my tasks were the easiest . G can't go pick up food. The coders that are still here (A & B) aren't interested in what we're getting so we can't ask them to go. O is the only one and he mutters something about not wanting to drive. A little more time and cleaning happens and we decide that we're not going to be going out to pick up lunch and we're all on our own. Before this, however, O has vanished.

While O is gone, M calls in and says his appointment is done and would we like him to pick up sandwiches for us. We cheer and message him our orders. Shortly after this, P is walking past the breakroom and notices O is in there. With food from the place we all had agreed on. O went and didn't tell anyone he was going there, after initially saying he didn't want to drive, and didn't offer to pick anything up for us.

Best of all, he went and hid in the breakroom hoping that none of us would notice that he wasn't eating at his desk (which he normally does). I was so busy with my data that I didn't even notice him sitting in there until P pointed it out - because I can see directly INTO the breakroom where O was sitting. Trust me, O had a look of fear on his face when P asked me if I knew that O had gone to the place we had all agreed on for lunch. P promptly read him the riot act (including the "you know what happens when you don't feed Ann, don't you?") and I just looked at him and put it simply: "Jerk."

I wish I'd said what DH said after I told him all of this - "How does he manage to live with himself after that?". I SO wish I had thought that clearly, but I was seeing red. Pure pure red and was biting my tongue so that I didn't blow up. Because you don't screw with me and lunchtime. All the guys agreed that that was a slimy thing to do, and O realized that he needs me with his new (female) boss coming in and she being a very data-centric individual. She and I clicked in her interview.

Anyway, the next day someone starts mentioning lunch around 9:30 in the morning and O asks if someone's going to pick food up just for themselves. Someone else points out "Oh, like you did yesterday?" Then the barbs and jabs about him being selfish come out, and he defends himself.

His defense? The reason he went out and didn't tell anyone where he was going was because it would take us about 10 minutes to figure out what we wanted and he didn't want to wait to collect those orders. He stated that it took 10 minutes for him to go to the place, order, get his food and get back to the office. 10 minutes. And he didn't want to wait an extra 10 for the rest of us to figure out what we wanted.

So, folks... tell me, when we were all under pressure and nothing was being asked of him, how is that not selfish? Clearly the man is not a team player (I knew that already though). Something it not right in the wiring of his brain. Self-centered and self-absorbed are perfect descriptions of him. He purposely hid in the breakroom so no one would see him eating. I ended up getting lunch thanks to M thinking of the rest of us while he was out and if he hadn't I'm sure I would have come up with something after all my required data mining was done, but that's just wrong. And you'd think that someone who is out of college would have figured that out...

...because even my daughters thought that was selfish and wrong, and they're not even in high school yet.