Eating in office way before and after lunch time is antisocial

[DyslexicScientist]

A few people in the office eat about 11am and 3pm. I wouldn't mind so much but the food is smelly andthey are noisey eaters (cutlery on a plate like they are playing a drum).

Aibu to think eating at your desk should just be limited to around lunch?

I think that either you're allowed to eat at your desk or you're not. If it's okay at lunchtime, then it's okay at other times.

My last workplace had break areas with enough seats for maybe 1 in 20 of the workers. The break areas were also often used as meeting spaces when meeting rooms were fully booked.
Realistically, it's difficult to avoid people eating at desks if there's not adequate space for them to eat in break areas.

And I agree which foods are smelly is very subjective. Although i did work in one office where the management banned fish entirely after one man came in early, cooked kippers for his breakfast in the staff microwave, and then left half of them in the kitchen bin. It was an amazingly pervasive stench.

I had to put music on to drown out that cacophony even just reading it, MaidOfStars

There are break rooms for this.

I every office in the world, ever?

You're having a laugh, you know that right?

YABU. I'm in my last few weeks before mat leave, and the heartburn struggle is oh so real. Am surviving by eating little and often, which means eating outside the allotted hours of 'lunchtime'.

It's common courtesy to leave the office and eat elsewhere if you're having curry/fish/something else particularly stinky, but in general, eating in offices is nowhere near as annoying as the pen-clicking, self-scratching, space-invading-stretching, and other things that happen. (That might just be my one annoying colleague though.)

It's a wonder there aren't more office based homicides.

It's only on MN that I have ever heard of people with so little going on in life they are all black affronted by other people eating.

I've worked in loads of places with no break/staff room, hot desks, cubicles, etc.

People ate all day long. BFD.

If you knew me in rl you'd have no idea I hate eating noises, expatinscotland. People don't say this. People (> 19y) equally don't say anything if you fart. It's not the done thing to comment in rl, so we come on mn and say it here .

YABU. I'm so glad I work in a small office where we all just talk to each other rather than seething quietly about our pet peeves.

I'm in a residential townhouse converted into an office in Chelsea... there's no canteen! Every room is an office, or a meeting room, or a bog.

Now there will be 400 posts about what doesn't smell and what does and the freaks who think the entire world should eat only rice and fruit around them or furtively nibble will come out.

Fruit smells too

Not sure about rice as I've never had that by itself?

Oh, I'm just harking back to the 'eating on a train' thread, Stitches, where one poster told me I should eat fruit, rice, salad or a 'polite sandwich' only. I'm diabetic - fruit and rice on their own spike my blood sugar, and all the veggie sandwich fillings which don't were too smelly for her. There was another poster who claimed he kept his sandwich in his coat pocket and took furtive bites of it as he walked, even surreptitiously nibbling it on escalators in The Tube, in case someone blazing past on the left would be offended by the smell of a Pret a Manger sandwich.

I ate whatever the hell I pleased. Glad of it, too. The train experienced major delays through Cumbria due to flooding. Took us nearly 6 hours to go from Glasgow to London thanks to that. I was inhaling the pleasant fumes of the prosecco the ladies behind me were quaffing in large amounts.

Hopefully the forthcoming 400 posts will illustrate to OP that smelly is in the eye of the beholder. Or nose. FWIW I'd take the smell of curry over a tuna wrap any day.

I was saying both tuna and curry smell.

My wrap less so as just had veggies.

expat, that sounds like a thread for the ages.

What the devil is a polite sandwich and what does the opposite (a rude sandwich? A raucous one?) look/smell like...?

I'm glad I don't work with the OP quite frankly. She seems to find a lot to complain about.

I kind of want to throw maid out of the window, into the canal with a bricks tied to her lighthearted

so little going on in life

Its two sences overloaded and I can't concentrate. Like being at a band practice in a fish market.

I'm surprised there aren't more office hommocides too.

Re-heated fish and day old egg mayo sandwiches are the only food whiffs I think should be banned in the office.

Some vegetables stink. Mushrooms, for instance. The smell makes me want to heave but I'm not going to deny someone the pleasure of eating their mushroom soup because of my personal taste.

Someone where I work has chilli or bolognese at 8am. I have issues with food that smells so it's akin to torture for me. Then the fan goes on because they're too hot, so there's no escape.

reni2 I totally get that

oh no, I think i've been doing it wrong all these years. I thought the main point of eating on public transport was to repel people and protect your personal space. I purposely eat peperamis and pickled onion monster munch with my mouth open on the tube, so no one sits next to me. Is one not meant to do that then?

No no, MrsKoala, your approach works very well. I would take a cab immediately.

We don't have a break room. The kitchen is an area with a kettle and microwave and mini fridge but nowhere to eat. So we eat at the desk. But it's a small company and often I can be the only person in the open plan office.

Miss the days of a proper canteen and a place to sit away from the desk. That has been a lot of years though as prior to this job I worked as a midwife and we had a break room and a canteen subsidised but never had breaks to use it!

One of the sounds I hate more than any other is the sound of a spoon being bashed or tapped against a cereal bowl. At any time of the day. YANBU