Breakfast at work

Mahmoud Ahmad AUGUST, generally, is a lean month for news and happenings, so writing about something topical is at a premium. Hence I decided to talk about something in a lighter vein while trying to put a serious point across. I have been thinking about this article for a while now, and the issue is related to violation at office place. Picture this. Here I will cite two examples of a man from Saudi Arabia, and one from the West. In the first frame, Mike wakes up early in the morning, way before his working hours. He goes jogging or for a morning walk before he returns home and then fixes his breakfast, has it and then goes to work. He arrives ten minutes before his working hours start and then without wasting much time, he is ready to work and starts on time or well before it. I do not have to specify from where Mike comes from. In the second frame, we have a man in contrast to Mike. Let’s call him Saud, and he daily sleeps well past, sometimes by more than 30 minutes, the time his work starts, before he wakes up. Then he turns the whole house upside down in his rush to reach work. The words jogging or morning walk is not in his lexicon nor is morning exercise a familiar concept to a good majority in Saudi Arabia. He misses breakfast at home and speeds to work in a desperate hope of making up time. Am I painting a familiar sight? One thing Saud and his ilk do not miss is their daily breakfast. You may well ask how? The good part of this story is planning for breakfast at workplace and not at home. There is a sacred covenant between a good percentage of Saudi staff that breakfast at work is essential, even at the expense of getting the job done or starting on time. Morning phone calls between staff is about what to get for breakfast, who will get it and from where? Such practice is rarely seen in most private companies. People need to adhere to office rules and most firms ban having breakfast at office. But this practice of a morning breakfast meeting is often seen at government departments. If the place is half empty, then that half is having their usual meeting around the breakfast table during working hours or having their breakfast at a small eatery outside work. A sight many must have seen or heard from others. Many a times when I go up the elevator early in the morning in government or business buildings, I smell the aroma of the variety of food that the staff have brought to the workplace. I even see workplace cleaners are sent to bring breakfast because the staff cannot function without having their breakfast behind or on the desk. A friend of mine who went to a government department branch in Madinah around nine in the morning to get some paperwork done was told, when he saw the empty offices, that they were having a morning meeting. He believed it until one of the doors opened and a staff member, with his sleeves rolled up and still chewing whatever that was in his mouth, walked out of the meeting room. He peeked inside and saw the table full of breakfast and the staff having tea while chatting and laughing. My friend said that he wasted 30 minutes of his time before they returned back to their desks. I had experienced this myself long time back when I visited a government department in Jeddah to get some papers signed. The offices early in the morning were deserted. I waited for the person, who had to sign my papers, for 15 minutes outside his office before I asked one of the cleaners about the staff. He pointed to a big room down the hall and said they are were there. When I went there I saw a lot of people sitting on the ground having their breakfast. They were kind enough to invite me to share in their breakfast. They even told me that some of the people who have come to get their papers signed are partaking in the breakfast with them. I smiled knowing that another 30 minutes would be wasted before they return back to work. Another time when I had an encounter of the ‘breakfast kind’ was another government department in Jeddah. I saw how the staff quickly disappeared to the back offices when the cleaner returned from a morning mission of buying sandwiches. All of a sudden many of them had something to do behind a closed office and we were left with only one or two staffers working and dealing with our papers. A friend of mine, who is working at human resources in a private company, told me a funny story when they issued a new rule to ban smoking inside the office and having breakfast at workplace He said that the staff did not complain about the smoking ban but strictly objected to the rule banning breakfast inside offices. When he explained that the food intake was being done during office times and the company property being used could get damaged because of food dropping or drinks spilling, they gave him a counter suggestion to allow staff to have their breakfast in any room away from the desk and computer. The office cleaners too joined in the protest saying that such a decision would deprive them of the small tips they get for bringing food. It is fine in my opinion to have a quick bite of snack inside office as long as it does not delay work. A staffer can easily wait for the lunch hour to have his lunch or brunch or have his own breakfast anytime he wants before work starts. It is enough that there are many reasons why people disappear from work or show up late, some even using prayer times as an excuse to disappear for one hour before and one hour after and most of the time not showing up after prayer. Let’s not make having breakfast at office another reason for delaying work. — The writer can be reached at [email protected] Twitter: @anajeddawi_eng