dice boot!

My brother Knocker, who lives in Raleigh as well, asked me what I did for lunch every day at my new job. I told him I hadn't really figured out a routine yet. A week later, I realized he was probably working up to asking me if I would like to have lunch with him, now that I'm so close and all. So I emailed him, apologized for being a doofus and not picking up on the hint, and said that I would love to have lunch with him. He replied that he hadn't been asking me to lunch at all, he'd merely been interested in the kind of luncheon social dynamics at the workplace. I thought about it some more and realized that since Knocker is the same kind of person that I am, had he wanted to eat lunch sometime, he would have, you know, just asked me if I wanted to eat lunch sometime.

Surprisingly, this entry is not about how people should just say what they mean. That would be quite a short entry, and it would go like this:

People should just say what they mean.

And now it's over, and I've got all this empty space here, so I'll have to talk about something else. It might as well be lunch social dynamics. And German board games.

I remember, way back in a simpler time, when I did not know about office politics. Worrying about what to do at lunchtime seemed such a high school thing. But, alas, too many things that I thought would fade with my graduation from West Caldwell High have found their way into my adult life, most of them social.

At the old job, there were basically three lunchtime options. The first one was to not eat. I don't really include this option as viable, though I did it on a couple of busy days. Some people did it every day. The second one is to go out to a restaurant and eat. There was usually a group of people who did this and anyone was always welcome to tag along. The final option was to eat in your office, either something you brought from home or takeout. It wasn't such a bad system. I ate out rarely, usually when they were going out to a restaurant that I favored. Otherwise I just holed up in my office with one serving out of a cauldron of homemade stroganoff.

Of course, there was basically a core group of people who ate out every day. I guess the term for that would be a "clique," but it seems strange to call it thus when you're talking about middle-aged computer programmers and not cheerleaders (middle-aged or otherwise). In any case, I never felt that I belonged as a part of that group. I think now that my days eating lunch as part of a cozy circle of close friends are over. I guess I shouldn't have gone into a male-dominated field.

At my new job, the setup seems very similar. There are the restaurant people, the desk eaters (those who eat at their desks, not those who eat their desks), as well as people who sort of combine the two groups. They bring their food back to work, but they eat it in the communal break room while reading the paper or talking to whoever else is there. Then, there is one last class of lunchers, and it is this group with which I have taken up. We spend our lunch hour playing games.

I love games. I'm probably setting a record for number of board games owned, given the fact that I live alone. So I don't get to play them very often, but I have them. After all, what if someone came by one day with a hankering to play Scattergories and I was not prepared? It came as a hard hit to me to finally understand that a lot of people just aren't that into games. I don't know if it's the competition, the technology-free time spent, the wholesome quality time with friends, or a combination of the three. But I like games a lot, to the point where I used to play them by myself as a kid. I'm talking Monopoly, people, by myself. In my defense, I always won, because the "other" players continuously made moves that were strategically advantageous to me. My imaginary friends were not very good at games, as it turned out.

And apparently I have found a group of like-minded individuals (or other formerly lonely children). The games we play are like none I've never heard of before. A lot of them are imported from Europe and include bilingual instructions. They are all thinking and strategy, rather than luck-based games. It's like playing Risk instead of Life or Bridge instead of Go Fish. Yesterday, we played a game about continental drift. In a world where I thought I was into games, these people showed me how wrong I was. Yesterday, one of my new game buddies sent out an email saying he was making an order from this site, pointing out that since he was ordering $60 worth of merchandise, the rest of us only had to order a total of $65 more to get free shipping for everyone. I didn't order anything, but I did develop a fascination for the Dice Boot. And that was before I found out that one of my new lunchtime friends has two of them.

As in any new social situation, I was concerned about acceptance. This scenario is a little more complicated, though. I make the fifth person in the lunchtime gaming group, and one of the much-loved games was a four-person one. I felt uncomfortable and vaguely unwanted every time someone mentioned the game, as I felt responsible for its recent shelfing. But then today, we spent our daily hour excitedly modifying the game to create our own version, one suitable for five players. If that's not acceptance, I don't know what is.