Originally posted on October 14, 2012 by Nicole

Author’s note: Current day commentary has been added in italics.

Do you work in an office environment (down to a couple of days a week now). Do you typically buy or bring your lunch to work only to eat it at your desk ( used to be no- but there’s no lunchroom on my floor but I have an office now)? If so, here is a friendly piece of advice. If you have trash generated from your lunch, do everyone in your office a favor and throw it away in the trash can located in your company’s lunchroom or kitchen or whatever trash can is farthest away from where you and your co-workers sit (yup I still do this cause I don’t want food trash in my office).  

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch: https://www.pexels.com/photo/crumpled-fast-food-paper-packet-4109270/

Each day, thousands of workers find themselves relegated to eating lunch at their desk due to:

• Lunchrooms that look like they were originally built as bomb shelters and are therefore more depressing than one’s cubicle or office (yup still the case- same building,different company, different floor with now zero accessible breakrooms).
• Lack of outdoor seating areas with actual shade.
• Smartphone is on the fritz  so you haven’t had time to check in on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Tumblr/Pinterest/Foursquare (Twitter now X, idk if ppl still use Foursquare or Tumblr), so you need to use your work computer to let your friends know how completely stupid your dumb boss is because he or she needed your help to figure out how to get in on today’s Groupon deal (no really my boss at the time made me help her with this).
• Just too busy and can’t afford the luxury of a lunch hour (this is a basic right, so you should really fight for this one).

Health and workplace experts are always telling us we shouldn’t eat lunch at our desk.  Eating at your desk adds germs to your workplace surfaces (seriously wipe down your workspaces weekly with Clorox wipes), and you don’t get a chance to “unplug” and clear your mind, which often times bogs down your afternoon productivity.

Despite the numerous warnings from “experts”, walk into any workplace and you see countless workers hunched over their desk scarfing down whatever they could throw together in their lunchbox before running out the door that morning.

It happens, and I’m not here to lecture people on the hazards of eating at your desk. But if you are a cubicle lunch eater, I want you ask yourself a question.  That question is “do I enjoy the smell of rotting trash?”

If you answered “yes” to the above question, just stop reading this blog post right now. Nothing I say will change your mind about your habits.

If you answered “no”, then next time you get ready to throw away that banana peel or can of sardines in the trash can sitting right under your desk, imagine yourself sitting on a mountain of banana peels and sardines.  It isn’t a pleasant scenario to imagine, isn’t it.  But guess what – the is probably the image that your cubicle neighbor will generate once that sardine can hits the bottom of your stinky trash can.

I know some of you out there might say “but I throw stuff away all the time at my desk and I never smell anything.”  To those people, I say liar liar pants on fire. Even though you don’t notice the odor, odors have a way of working through cube walls.  Your cube mate didn’t eat clams casino for lunch, so your cube mate didn’t acclimate to the smell and become oblivious to it – you did. The odor from your lunch may not bother you, but it most likely is bothering someone else.

So, my tip is quite simple.  Don’t throw away your food trash at your desk.  Get some exercise, and walk on over to the lunchroom to throw your trash away in that trash bin. Your co-workers will thank you.( Also, I can’t emphasize this enough, wipe your workspace down with Clorox wipes at least once a week.)