Sharing food is fun....not

I work in a place where we have lunch together, as in everybody together. There are plates of food placed on the table like a buffet. Looks cool and all, a little bonding among friendly colleagues and alike. Happy banter as you tuck in to nice warm food cooked by the friendly cafeteria aunty. You can already smell the lovely smells of warm lunch whipped up by the aunty wafting through the air as you walk towards the cafeteria. Sounds like perfect lunch-paradise. Well I agree too.

BUT, being a hypochondriac that is, this is in fact lunch-hell. Imagine this scenario, we share food but we use the forks that we are also using to eat, to scoop food from the general plates to our own individual plates. There are no public forks to specifically scoop food out from the public plates of food. That's very scary for me, I do not like to share someonelse' saliva while having lunch with them. I especially feel icky whenever they use forks which they eat from to scoop out food that have some gravy in it. It's like the gravy is a swimming pool of bacteria from everyone's saliva. Also, there are some with very bad eating etiquette, they will be forking out food from the public plates, right into their mouths, licking the forks clean and then forking out food from the public plate again, repeatedly. The problem is, I have to eat with them and I can't possibly tell them to use a new fork when scooping out food, because that will be just too rude. To top off the nightmare, I know many of them are no saints, they have their own outlets of gratification if you know what I mean; single and lusty(SAL), married but available (MBA), you get my drift.

So, I have resorted to coming down alittle earlier for lunch so as to scoop the clean freshly cooked food before these MBAs and SALs dig in. Or worse come to worst, those tucking in to the food on the public plates after licking their forks clean, I will not touch those. Bleagh...just makes me feel too uncomfortable to be swapping saliva with them this way. Or, another way is to come down later than the rest, so the aunty will prepare new food for me after all of them have had their fill.

Don't get me wrong, the food is good and I like my colleagues, but no matter how much you like them, its never enough to be able to swap saliva like that through sharing food.