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in the court of the Lunch King
Tuesday, April 1 2025
I had some leftover spaghetti with meatballs with me at work today and was sort of dreading eating it with the others who eat in that upstairs conference room, because I find the social dynamic there oppressive. There is that older guy from the factory part of the company who holds court while the others mostly eat their food in silence or occasionally chime in about the subject the Lunch King has chosen to talk about. But, whatever, I also don't feel like I should ignore that part of company culture. So I heated up my food in the microwave and went to take a seat in the conference room. There was a rather large new gentleman I didn't recognize sitting next to the seat I normally sit in, and I didn't want to crowd him, so I sat one seat sat closer to the Lunch King. He immediately objected, saying that that was the seat for R, the project manager guy I've normally seen sitting there (he was also the guy who gave me the company-wide tour on the day I was interviewed). So I moved to my normal seat, the one closer to the unknown fat guy, and started eating my spaghetti with meatballs. But I had something I wanted to find out: could I change the topic of discussion in the king's court? So when, after a considerable period of time, there was a brief moment of silence, I asked if the building ever flooded, something I've been wondering since noticing its proximity to the mighty Rondout Creek (the only creek I know of with a river, the Wallkill, as a tributary). Interestingly, this caused the Lunch King to hold forth for some time on the issue of flooding in the Rondout Valley and in this building in particular, which has only ever flooded in the basement that I didn't know it had. After that, the conversation drifted to subjects that I had no interest in. I've never seen anyone ever leave during that half hour in the lunch conference room, and it felt like a rule, but after a certain point I couldn't take it any more, so I just got up and and left.
Later the CEO had me, the lead developer, and the project manager guy in his office to talk about various things, including his idea that maybe I start doing code review and a recent deluge of status emails from a server that had been temporarily offline. Inevitably, though, we got to the kind of casual chit-chat that such informal meetings always turn into. It came up that the Lunch King had made me move to a different seat during lunch, since the one I had sat in was "reserved" for the project manager. The CEO seemed entertained and a little disturbed that such rules exist. And then the project manager guy chided me for leaving lunch early; as I'd deduced, the unwritten rule at lunch is that everyone stays until 12:30pm and then leaves en masse.
On the drive home, I stopped at the MyTown Marketplace in Stone Ridge for provisions, particularly orange juice and a six pack of beer. I wanted a road beer for the drive home, since Gretchen would be spending the night down in Brooklyn. When I got home, I immediately took the dogs for a walk, starting on Stick Trail and then at some point climbing the tallest section of the escarpment up to the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, drinking my road beer the whole time. Back at the house, I snacked on both meatball leftovers and leftover "Indian" food, though in separate "meals." I tried to interrupt my drinking with a cup of kratom tea, though I could tell I'd probably drunk enough to have a hangover tomorrow.
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