Woman Refuses To Eat Her Co-Worker's Office Treats Because He Kisses His Dog On The Mouth — 'I Can't Even Look At The Food'
Can you trust a messy pet owner's kitchen to be clean?
Diego Cervo / Canva Pro | Cory Seamer / Vagengeim / Shutterstock.com When you eat other people's food you're technically eating whatever germs are also in their kitchen. For most of us, this is a silly thing we just shrug off unless we know the person in question is truly a slob.
But for the more germaphobe-prone among us, it's enough to make them downright apoplectic. And for one woman on Reddit, her co-worker's pet care habits have her feeling downright nauseated by the cooking he routinely brings into the office.
She refuses to eat her co-worker's office treats because he's always covered in dog hair.
Food and the office are such a fraught combination — those terrible office potlucks go viral for a reason! We all have such different ideas of what is and is not good cooking in the first place, and when it's mixed with the awkward, forced social dynamics of the office, it makes bad food feel like a means of torture.
But that's all before you even consider whether or not their kitchen is clean, and for this Redditor, that is a far more important concern than whether or not the food is good.
She's been an appreciative good sport about her lovely co-worker's habit of bringing her homemade food each week. But eating it, on the other hand? Not happening, for hilarious but also kind of relatable reasons.
She throws her co-worker's cooking away because he kisses his dog on the mouth.
"I know wasting food is terrible, and I know I should be grateful, but hear me out," she wrote in her since-deleted Reddit post. "I have a big phobia of eating other people's cooking when I've never seen their house or how clean it is."
Admittedly, that's a bit much. You have to be a really, really big germaphobe to be that concerned, right? You already work in an office that, as we've learned in recent years, is basically a Petri dish. Is it really this serious?
Well… yeah, actually, it kind of is in this case! "He has two dogs and is always covered in dog hair," she went on to write, adding: "he also kisses his dogs on the mouth." That sound you hear is every dog-obsessed person on Earth simultaneously protesting that this is unfair and egregious. "Dogs' mouths are cleaner than ours!" they exclaim.
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But can we all admit that a person who makes out with canines and turns up to work coated in dog hair is a specific genre of person?
Personally, I picture someone who looks on lovingly as their dog leaps up and knocks you onto the floor as you enter their home, gleefully exclaiming, "Oh, he likes you!" as their dog mauls at your carotid artery.
In short, they lack boundaries when it comes to their animals — and that can often extend to an uncomfortably loose commitment to making sure their dog is using the bathroom outside instead of, say, all over the kitchen where their food is prepared. It calls to mind all those myriad "you can't eat at everybody's house" memes — you just never know!
Some felt she was being overly uptight, but others felt she was well within her rights to refuse the food.
Admittedly, this woman does have a seemingly outsized reaction to her co-worker's pet habits. "The idea that if I eat this food, I'm probably also consuming dog hair and dog slobber grosses me the heck out," she said. "I feel awful about it, but there is nothing that will make me try that man's food."
How she supposes dog slobber is getting INTO the food is anyone's guess, but as a person who immediately wonders if there's litter box residue in anything cooked by a person who owns a cat that I assume traipses all over their countertops the minute they leave the house, I personally get where she's coming from.
Some on Reddit pointed out that if she's willing to eat in restaurants, this is all pretty silly. They may be held to cleanliness standards, but anyone who's worked in one will tell you they're not nearly as clean as your sensibilities.
But others said they didn't blame her. One Reddit commenter noted that "most people don't even wash their hands… after they go to the bathroom," let alone before they cook, after all. And several urged her to either simply refuse the food or make an excuse.
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"If you don't have the heart to say you don't want the food," one wrote, "say that you can't have the food anymore because your doctor is having you eat a very specific monitored diet." Either way, as one commenter put it, "No is a complete sentence," and nobody's required to eat someone's dog hair du jour!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.