1. Be prepared – plan a safe route to the morning tea, because as soon as the spread is ready and the email goes out, the office-bison will start stampeding without mercy.
2. Speaking of mercy, show some on the poor graduates who are probably working for peanuts, exposure and the opportunity. Every sausage roll you take from their mouths is another grovelling phone call to their parents so they can afford a half priced Croissant Express BLT at the end of the day.
3. Moderation – you can always go back for more, so don’t test the structural integrity of your paper plate, you’ll lose every time. Also, everyone notices when you take an egregious handful of chips. Settle down, your hand is not a piece of heavy mining equipment.
4. Be social – try to bond with your coworkers and avoid going full-Gollum in the corner with your precious party pies. This is meant to be a social outing, keep your anti-social gluttony in check.
5. Table manners – if your boss can’t trust you not to spray his new tie with chunks of Monte Carlo, how can he trust you with the Johnson file?
6. NOTE – this especially extends to sauce etiquette. If your useless office manager has dumped all the dead ‘orse into a bowl then please use a spoon. Together we can stop the bowl turning into a shipwreck of floating bits of pastry corpses and spittle.
7. Prepare – don’t bring a white shirt to a morning tea fight you irredeemable lump of corporate slobbery. You’ve tried to desperately clean stains off your clothes before. It doesn’t work that well does it?
8. Extraction mission – to avoid looking like a sweaty glutton, loudly announce you are taking a final plate to a coworker who got left behind, then devour it in your own private den of shame.
