An office worker has been banned from bringing their favourite sandwich into work due to the overpowering odour it emits.
The anonymous individual’s plight was shared on Fesshole, the confessions page on X where people divulge their embarrassing secrets without revealing their identity, sparking quite the reaction online.
The post read: “HR have made me agree not to eat sardine and kimchi baguettes in the break room at work anymore.” Sympathy was in short supply as social media users chimed in with their own horror stories of smelly food encounters in workplace break rooms, highlighting the unwritten ‘work etiquette’ against foul smelling scran.
One person commented: “Everyone knows there’s such a thing as work etiquette which basically means no eating of fish.” Another user lamented the double standards when it comes to workplace smells, saying: “They’re always so proactive about this but when an actual human being STINKS to high heaven, everybody pretends otherwise.”
A third recounted how a colleague’s daily microwaved sardines led to a campaign to have him moved to another branch, sharing: “Former colleague of mine used to microwave sardines for lunch every day. It would stink the office out, so the rest of us asked for him to be transferred to another branch office.”
Some have learnt their lesson about reheating pungent foods in the office, with one employee admitting: “I once microwaved a chowder one work lunchtime. Never been allowed to forget it and rightly so. Don’t know what I was thinking.”
However, there were those who defended the original poster, sharing their own experiences of being cautioned over their lunch choices. One colleague commented: “Yep, was told not to eat pilchards in the office. Mainly because a tin was left in a bin over a weekend and the office was honking on the following Monday.”
Another chimed in: “May be the only one here, but I don’t find this unreasonable at all.” A third said: “It’s no one else’s business what you eat. This makes me cross.”