Eat This: Boxed Lunches

At every offsite meeting, and I mean EVERY offsite meeting, we are presented with boxed lunches.  Even if it is not lunch time. We will always receive some kind of box filled with supposedly edible items.

I didn't mind this so much in the beginning, before I understood the evil that Indonesian food can hold, particularly since many of my meetings were in large group settings where no one would notice if I didn't consume every last little nugget of goodness.

However, things got progressively worse.  I learned just what a box of ill-prepared room temperature meat could do to a person. Furthermore, I started having smaller, more intimate meetings.  Where there might only be four or five of us at the table.  And I couldn't just not eat.  I couldn't be the asshole American who defies protocol and manners and refuses to eat the food that has been generously provided.

Thus began my intense fear and loathing of the boxed lunch. A daily peril of expat life in Jakarta.

I do not return the love, nasty boxed lunch.