A question from ShipIt

Frank,

Your campaign reporting job recalls my experience working at Microsoft in the mid-90's, for it too was a tsunami of junk food. If you were an Oompah Loompah, your job was to do whatever necessary in your never-ending workweeks to ship software on time. To this end, Microsoft stocked its cafeterias with subsidized food and drink that is more Want-to-Eat than Supposed-to-Eat, minimizing the likelihood you'd ever waste time by leaving the campus.

If you let yourself go with the flow, this could be a typical day:

7:00AM. Breakfast in the Cafeteria. Get a Denny's Grand Slam emulation at half the price. Alternatively or additionally, fill your cereal bowl from self-serve bins of Fruit Loops, Life, Cap'n Crunch, or Apple Jacks. Add free milk, one of the many ubiquitous Free Drinks available. Your colleague likes chocolate milk on his Cocoa Puffs; you'll try that tomorrow. You discuss and agree: chocolate milk on Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch would rock.

8:00AM. The Kitchen wing. The coffee maker is brewing, but the carafe will probably stay full for a while because engineers tend to prefer Mountain Dew for their morning caffeine. The movie-theater- popcorn maker has been quiet too long, which means it's your turn to get it going: dump a cup of kernels from the giant bucket into the metal basin, add neon-orange movie-theater-butter-flavored oil and hit start.

8:05AM. The smell wafting through the hallways announces the popcorn is ready. You and your colleagues emerge from your offices, dusting your bowls of popcorn with neon-orange movie-theater-butter-flavored powder to get it from white to yellow, just like at the movies. A Jolt or another Mountain Dew helps wash it down.

9:55AM. A meeting has ended; someone points into a conference room. There's a leftover tray piled with bear claws, scones and muffins. Isn't that a chocolate-chocolate chip muffin with cheesecake filling? Everyone's going to go for that first, so you'd better take it while you have the chance.

10:27AM. Mike and Pete and Steve's respective wives have baked chocolate chip cookies, brownies and Jello Poke Cake, which are laid out on chairs outside their offices. That leaves just one hallway leading to the printer without any food in it. You've never had Poke Cake and you're curious, so turn left, not right…

11:30AM. Is the popcorn maker quiet again? The silence when it's not popping is unnerving, because it implies that consumption is down because we aren't all here today, and what will that do to our progress report tonight? We can't fall further behind. Someone pops more.

12:00PM. Back to the Cafeteria for lunch. On your left is the Saute Station, with General Tso's Chicken and Beef Phad Thai; on your right is the 6 Foot Sub Sandwich (you tell them what size you want and they will carve it a few inches larger, because anything remaining after lunch will have to be thrown out) and the Grill (offering hamburgers, cheese burgers, bacon cheese burgers, any of which can be doubled, and regular, curly cajun or waffle fries).

The Cafeteria does have a Salad Bar, but being seen at it is a way to announce that you're in Marketing, or majored in English and work for Slate. In other words, you don't write code and therefore don't drive the stock price up. Don't lose face.

Your last steps to the register are flanked by floor freezers filled with Haagen Daz and Klondike ice cream bars, Drumsticks, ice cream sandwiches and popsicles in many colors. The guy in front of you slid the door open to get his, and based on the look in your eyes, holds the door open for you.

2:30PM. You need caffeine, so head for the cafeteria's Starbucks. Your favorite drink these days is a venti triple mocha. It's cool how they make a domed lid to fit the whipped cream. People off campus get only a drip coffee for what you paid for this.

3:11PM. Popcorn. (After the sweet mocha, the saltiness balances things out). If you're sick of popcorn, the vending machine has Doritos.

4:18PM. We gave up our offsite team-building Paintball day because we're behind schedule. The team morale money still needs to be spent, so our manager brings us boxes of donuts. Someone grumbles that another team has a Margarita machine. Yes, our manager needs to get us a Margarita machine. And we need to play Paintball.

6:30PM. Dinner is in the conference room; a uniformed vendor unloads Thai food into giant heated catering trays. So much has been ordered that despite going back for two or three helpings, we never manage to empty the troughs of Panang Curry, Phad Thai, Swimming Rama, rice, Spring Rolls and Peanut sauce.

Whereas dinner rotates (Tuesday: Pizza, Wednesday: Chinese, Thursday: Indian, Friday:Wraps), the Dessert Platter always has the same giant cookies and brownies that Starbucks sells. There are enough for two for everyone, so take one for now, one for later.

7PM-on. Popcorn, Chocolate milk, Coke, Mountain Dew, Starbucks molasses cookie, pizza from the fridge, ice cream from the freezer…

It didn't take long for me to realize that the calories burned sitting at a computer were no match for amount of food around; of course I gained weight. What took longer to realize was that for the first time in my life, I alone had to ring the alarm bells. Initial self-consciousness about my weight gain faded fast. Because we were all gaining weight, no one noticed or cared about my weight gain in particular.

Whereas your colleagues on the campaign trail were aware of and struggled against weight gain, and you were always painfully aware of your pants size, the typical Microsoft engineer would be most likely be wearing elastic-topped sweatpants that made him oblivious to his expanding waistline. Add to that a roomy Microsoft-supplied t-shirt, ordered in sizes (L, XL, XXL or XXXL) most likely to fit all team members. In other words, Large was the Small at Microsoft, and the only size that mattered was the size of your stock options.

While I have never since worked in such an intensely obesogenic environment, it taught me that many of our environments in life are obesogenic to some degree. And that it's not just food that makes for an obesogenic job, it's the grueling hours that steal time for sleep and exercise and preparation of healthy meals. Too many of us only count the salary when deciding whether to stay at such a job; we fail to count the cost to our health. We both started getting healthier only after we left our obesogenic jobs.