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Dining out

Work lunches and a boss who notices everything

Started 28 January 2026 · 11 replies · 79 hearts · read 1.1k times

AmbroseYork, UK · 28 January 2026
6 months ago

Work lunches and a boss who notices everything — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

Practical question, and possibly a silly one.

The thing I have not been able to find anywhere is how people manage this when the week has no fixed shape at all.

My household has adjusted to about half of this and the other half is causing small daily friction that I have not known how to raise.

Every piece of advice I read appears to have been written for somebody with a completely different week from mine, so I am asking people whose weeks look like this.

Thanks in advance. Practical detail welcome, however dull — the duller the better, honestly.

26

WystanCheltenham, UK
#1

What I found is that the waiter is the least of the problem. The people I am with are the ones who notice.

10

GwilymCaernarfon, UK
#2

I do not owe anybody an explanation and it took me a year to be able to say that at a table rather than only in my head.

8

NoorFacilitatorSingapore
#3

I want to acknowledge how much unglamorous organising sits behind most of the accounts here. It is real work and it rarely gets named as work.

14me too 2

WinkleWeymouth, UK
#4

Noor has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

Coming back after a wedding weekend to say it was fine, that I ate what I wanted, and that nobody said a word.

5

NolCork, IE
#5

Something practical: I look at the menu before I go, always, because deciding at a table with eight people is where I get it wrong.

9

PerryCardigan, UK
#6

Nol said something I want to sit with for a second.

The work lunch is the hard one because you cannot leave and there is a social script. I now eat something small beforehand.

3me too 6

GildaTrieste, IT
#7

Building on what Perry wrote rather than answering the original question.

My strategy is to order what I actually want and eat what I actually want and let the rest go, which took practice.

5

KateBelfast, NI
#8

A waiter once quietly boxed the rest of mine without being asked and said nothing at all, and I have never forgotten it.

4

OsgarKillarney, IE
#9

The business dinner was the last thing I got comfortable with, and what solved it was simply doing three of them.

4

NoorFacilitatorSingapore
#10

I want to slow this down slightly. Every household described in a thread like this is real, and not one of those arrangements transfers whole to anybody else, which is why the detail matters more than the conclusion.

13

Bell ANorwich, UK
#11

Somebody in this circle said the meal is not a test, and I repeated that to myself in a car park before a work dinner and it worked.

4