“Sorry, I needed it more!”
That was the note, written in bubbly cursive on a bright pink Post-it. They left it on the pathetic, wilting salad they swapped for my lunch. The one I’d made using my late mother’s recipe.
It wasn’t just about the food. It was about the sheer, stunning entitlement. It was a pattern of disrespect that HR dismissed and my coworkers told me to just ignore.
They thought they could take what was mine and get away with a smiley face and a condescending excuse. They thought I would eventually just give up.
She wanted my mother’s pasta salad again, so I decided to make it for her one last time, with a brand new, secret ingredient.
The First Cut is the Deepest: A Small Piece of Order
The kitchen is my sanctuary before the world wakes up. The low hum of the refrigerator, the scent of coffee brewing—it’s a pocket of quiet I guard fiercely. In the pre-dawn glow, I lay out the ingredients on the cool granite countertop. Tonight’s dinner, tomorrow’s lunches. It’s a ritual of control in a life that often feels like a series of uncontrolled variables. My husband, Ben, thinks I’m a little obsessive about it. My daughter, Maya, just knows that if she wants the good snacks for school, she has to catch me before the bags are sealed.
This morning is for Mom’s Seven-Layer Pasta Salad. It’s not just a recipe; it’s a blueprint for a memory. Ditalini pasta, cooked just to al dente. A layer of sharp cheddar. Finely chopped red onion, its bite softened by a quick ice water bath. Crisp romaine, diced tomatoes, a crumble of bacon. The dressing is the secret, a creamy, tangy concoction her handwriting describes as “a little bit of this, a dash of that.” Making it feels like a conversation I can no longer have. It’s the one piece of her I can still conjure on demand.
I pack Maya’s lunch first—a turkey sandwich, an apple, a granola bar. Standard-issue teenage fuel. Then I carefully assemble my own meal in my favorite glass container, the one with the tight-sealing blue lid. It’s absurd to feel such affection for a piece of Tupperware, but it represents order. It represents a promise I make to myself: no matter how chaotic the day gets at GenTech Solutions, at 12:15 PM, I will have ten minutes of peace and a taste of home.
I place the container in my work tote, a small, solid weight of reassurance. Ben comes into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He kisses the top of my head, his voice a low rumble. “Pasta salad day?”
“The one and only,” I say.
“Don’t let the vultures in the sales department get it.” He says it every time I make it, a running joke between us. I smile, but a small, anxious knot tightens in my stomach. The fourth-floor breakroom fridge is less a communal appliance and more a lawless, chaotic wilderness.
The Exchange
The office air is a familiar mix of stale coffee, industrial carpet cleaner, and the low-grade anxiety of a hundred people pretending to be passionate about software documentation. My cubicle is my foxhole. I have my ergonomic chair, my two monitors, my picture of Ben and Maya at the beach. I spend the morning untangling the linguistic messes left by engineers, translating their technical jargon into language a human being can actually understand. It’s a job about creating clarity from chaos.
At 12:15 PM, my stomach rumbles on schedule. The Pavlovian bell for my ten minutes of peace. I walk the gray-carpeted hallway to the breakroom. The room is empty, save for the persistent hum of the vending machine. I pull open the heavy door of the stainless-steel fridge.
My spot is on the second shelf, right behind the carton of almond milk that’s been there since the Bush administration. But my glass container isn’t there. My heart does a little stutter-step. I push aside a bag of sad-looking carrots and someone’s questionable yogurt. Nothing.
Then I see it. In the exact spot where my lunch should be, there is another container. A cheap, plastic one with a lid that doesn’t quite fit. It’s translucent enough that I can see its contents: a few pieces of limp, browning lettuce and a single, pale slice of tomato.
A bright pink Post-it note is stuck to the lid. The handwriting is a bubbly, almost juvenile cursive. Four words are scrawled in black ink.
“Sorry, I needed it more!”
I stand there for a full minute, just staring. The words don’t compute. It’s not an apology. It’s a justification. A declaration. The sheer, unadulterated entitlement of it is breathtaking. It’s like being punched in the face by a stranger who then criticizes your posture. My mother’s recipe. My time. My one small piece of order for the day. Gone. Replaced by this insult of a salad and a note that feels like a slap. A hot, prickling anger starts behind my ears and spreads down my neck.
Corporate Solutions
I carry the pathetic plastic container and the pink note like evidence from a crime scene. I walk past my cubicle, past the curious glances of my coworkers, and straight to the glass-walled office at the end of the hall. Human Resources.
David looks up from his monitor, his expression one of mild annoyance at being disturbed. He’s young, with a haircut that probably cost more than my weekly groceries, and he always speaks in the carefully modulated, vaguely condescending tone of someone who has memorized a manual on conflict resolution but never experienced an actual conflict.
I place the container and the note on his desk. “Someone stole my lunch from the breakroom fridge and left this in its place,” I say. My voice is tight, but steady.
David picks up the note, reading it with a detached curiosity, like a scientist examining a strange insect. “Wow,” he says, with no actual surprise in his voice. “That’s… bold.”
“It’s the third time this month my lunch has gone missing,” I lie, hoping to add a sense of urgency. In reality, it’s the first time. “This is the first time they’ve left a note.”
He leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “Well, Elara, these things can happen in a shared-space environment. It’s a classic commons dilemma.” He says this as if naming the problem absolves him of having to solve it. “Did you have your name on it?”
“It’s a unique glass container I use every day. People know it’s mine,” I counter, my frustration mounting. “And even if it wasn’t, that doesn’t give someone the right to take it.”
“Of course, of course,” he says soothingly. “But from a best-practices standpoint, clear labeling is key. I’ll tell you what I can do. I can send out a general reminder email to the fourth-floor staff about respecting communal property and proper food etiquette.”
An email. A generic, toothless, easily-deleted email. I feel a wave of helplessness wash over me. I am reporting a theft, and he is offering me a platitude.
“That’s it?” I ask.
“It’s the most effective first step,” he says, his eyes already drifting back to his screen. “We want to foster a sense of community accountability, not create a punitive atmosphere.”
I pick up the sad salad and the pink note and walk out of his office, the anger now mixed with a bitter taste of futility. He wasn’t there to help me. He was there to manage the company’s liability, and a stolen lunch didn’t even register.
A Pattern of Entitlement
A week passes. The HR email comes out, a masterpiece of corporate jargon about “synergy” and “shared spaces” that is promptly ignored by everyone. I go back to packing my lunch, but the ritual is soured. I feel a low hum of anxiety every time I place my container in the fridge. I find myself eyeing my coworkers, wondering. Is it the quiet guy in IT? The overly cheerful woman from marketing? The office has become a lineup of suspects.
The following Tuesday, I pack a special sandwich. Leftover roast turkey from Sunday dinner, on thick slices of rye bread with a smear of expensive cranberry mayonnaise. It was a hard Monday, full of pointless meetings and a looming project deadline. I feel like I’ve earned this small luxury.
I put it in the fridge, nestled in its usual spot. I try to put it out of my mind, but it’s a low-level hum of dread all morning. At 12:15, I make the walk of shame back to the breakroom. My heart is pounding a little faster than it should.
It’s gone.
The plastic baggie with my sandwich is gone. In its place is a half-eaten bag of potato chips—the cheap, generic kind—and another pink Post-it note.
The same bubbly handwriting.
“Sorry, I needed it more! :)”
About the Author
