The other week, I was sitting at my desk eating my packed lunch and scanning Bloglines when I read Flexo’s Struggle: Spending on Food is Really About Motivation and the comments.

Oh how I sometimes wish I had a struggle of choosing whether or not to pack! With only a 30-minute lunch, not having a kitchen/breakroom, a cafeteria that closes for summer, only a 1.5 cu ft. compact fridge to share with four other people and feeling isolated from the rest of the campus departments, I have plenty of motivation for packing a lunch or go without!

We can keep all the food we can stuff in our desk drawers, but it an un-written rule that our fridge food not be kept longer than a few days because the lack of space. We have a water fountain that produces warm water so everyone keeps bottles of water in the fridge, which take up considerable room. For our potluck a couple weeks back, a coworker brought in a cooler and bag of ice so that we could keep our dishes chilled until lunchtime.

As a library, we have to staff a point of service 12 hours a day but our shifts do not always overlap at lunchtime (for whatever reason the scheduling of student workers specifically for covering the desk during lunch has not panned out). On the good side, if I pack my lunch I can take it to an outdoor spot (assuming the dead birds don’t skeeve me out too much and the bird poop is minimal), enjoy a little reading and pretend I am not at work. On the bad side, I am snapped back to reality when I see other campus employees rolling back from lunch and am a little jealous that even if I wanted to spend the money eating lunch out, that is not really an option.