Potlucks make everything better
There are rocky road cupcakes next to my head.
Closer still is a bowl of guacamole, baba ganoush and a box of homemade chocolate chip and butterscotch cookies.
Less than 6 feet away sits a table laden with fancy chips, crab tarts, doughnuts, pepperoni bread and a box of Starbucks coffee. My own cranberry chutney occupies a niche on another counter.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what my co-workers and I have creatively titled "Food Day," which takes place once a month on my side of the newsroom. It's a potluck that starts the minute we all walk in and has us rolling in the aisles soon after lunch, like Thanksgiving without football. (Most features people don't care that much about football, at least not in July.)
We started Food Day about 10 years ago as a way to celebrate our co-workers' birthdays. That got cumbersome, so we just changed it to the last Friday of every month.
There are boring ways to describe the appeal of Food Day, using terms such as "morale-boosting" and "reward systems" or "heightened camaraderie," but all of those syllables miss the heart of the issue: Food rocks.
Food Day feels a little like a party, albeit a quiet one, silence gently broken by tapping keyboards, ringing telephones, shoptalk and calls to meetings.
For our Christmas-in-July event, someone halfheartedly suggested Christmas carols, but that didn't get a lot of traction. Guacamole or not, we still have deadlines.
People from the other side of the newsroom wander over and marvel at our spreads, sometimes uttering words such as "Crazy," "Oh, my gosh" and my favorite, "You people are amazing." I can't ever tell if they think we're slackers or crackpots, but neither stops them from checking things out. Doughnuts and coffee go pretty quickly at this point.
Even Managing Editor Pat Howard comes over a couple of times, takes stock, scowls and walks away. Unless there's chicken wing dip. Not even Howard can resist chicken wing dip.
My point exactly.