Drawing circa 1995. Bayer Campus, Berkeley, CA.
my last ‘desk job’ was working for bayer. their berkeley site employed over a thousand people.
once a quarter the management held a sitewide meeting to talk about how the company was
doing, and to say inspirational things about the future.
at the end of the talk they would take questions.
one year at the november meeting an employee raised her hand right at the beginning.
the speaker acknowledged her, and politely asked her to save her question until the end.
the employee ignored the request, kept her hand raised, and started waving it around.
it was very distracting, so the speaker took her question just to be done with it.
the woman stood up and asked; “why do we have to have lasagna every year? we’re tired of
lasagna. why can’t we have something else?”
she was referring to the free meal given to all employees each year at the company cafeteria
around thanksgiving. apparently she felt that this was an urgent issue, and that any other
company business could wait.
for the rest of the day people talked and joked about the lasagna lady.
i was bored, so i sent an email to some coworkers asking if they’d be interested in forming a
lasagna task force to further investigate this pressing matter.
someone forwarded the email to the site manager – the one that had given the talk.
fortunately she had a sense of humor and was amused by it.