You bet I pack my lunch and take it to work (Well, my wife does the packing, and I get to take it to work!), and I’m proud of it too! And I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not a sandwich that I take to work. It’s all kinds of curries. Fish, chicken, beef, pork, eggs, egg plant, potato, spare ribs, including ribs that cannot be spared (Let’s not forget fillet mignon and caviar, which is part of my regular diet!), and any other stuff that can be curried while still staying within the law. I’m tired of eating the deep-fried artery clogging stuff that they ingest in these parts. Grits (or greeets, as we call it here) is, or are, perhaps the healthiest of all Southern feeds. May Greeeeets Be With You!

I’ve heard people saying, "Well, when you heat it up at work, it smells up the whole place", to which I say, "So wwwhat?!" Let it smell up the whole dog-gone place and fill the entire enclosure with nice spice aroma for all I care! Let these guys finally figure out that they’ve been doing it all wrong all this time! The way I see it is, when they hired me to do a job, they not only got my engineering and management expertise, but also a slew of other things --- my heritage, my culture, my ethnicity, my faults/defaults (double faults?), my numerous idiosyncrasies, and the great smell of my ethnic food. And they got it all for free! Zero! Zilch! Poojyam! What a deal they got! Come to think of it, I mustn’t give them so much. I must take some of it back. I’m being too liberal here. If I put a price on all those, it won’t take them too long to figure out that I’m working there for free --- well, almost.

The other reason why I take my lunch to work is that I only eat two meals on most of the days. Breakfast is a big American joke, especially Monday through Friday. It’s an illusion. It doesn’t count. It doesn’t exist. If it exists, I haven’t seen it. If I could manage to find thirty seconds in the morning, I’d drink a glass of milk, and out I go. And I don’t drive while eating or drinking, thank you! I just refuse to do it. I’ll also try not to make phone calls while driving. I don’t turn the rearview mirror toward me and keep looking in it to adjust my hair (what hair?!) at every traffic light. Sorry, but that’s a personal preference. That leaves me with lunch and dinner, or as they call them in the South, dinna and suppa. Supper is a salad (or salad is the supper, if you’re dyslexic, and want to reverse the order!), which for the most part is different permutations of lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, and corn, and a couple of pieces of chicken, if I’m a good boy. Then there is one meal left! And I must have it home-cooked. And what’s a better time than noon to do it? Plus, that’ll keep me away from all the Southern ‘treats’ which are also called ‘vein goo’ by the Yankees. I don’t know about y’all, but I have a metabolism which has a bad habit of assimilating nutrients from the atmosphere and injecting them right into my blood stream before they finally show up as billions of fat cells in my lower abdomen. Sort of like Spanish Moss, if you will, that they have all over Florida. But who cares about Florida, right?! I could weigh in at 152 pounds in the morning (none of that soaking wet stuff please; I’m not that kind of a guy!), and when I come back home after the day’s toil at the factory, I could be weighing as much as 157. I suspect I photosynthesize more than the average Joe due to the large chlorophyll content in my body, because on a cloudy day, I only gain about 3 pounds!

But mind you, there is a downside for doing lunch within the confines of one’s office. And that is that it will attract a fairly good size crowd at the office at about noon time, but I enjoy looking at those poor starving souls watch me eat! Call me cruel; I don’t care! But please remember, this is something that I do at my Corporate government office. Each individual situation may be different, and you may not want to try it at yours, unless of course, you are specially trained to do it, or at least are under the supervision of someone who is.

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