GASPPPPPPP I had completely forgotten that today is our company summer outing starting in the afternoon (= FREE SNACKS AND DINNER) and team lunch to welcome back boss S from her maternity leave (= FREE LUNCH) !!!!!!!!!!!!! This means that to be most optimally strategic, I should only eat half of my free team lunch today — I ordered King Wok lunch special chicken and broccoli with pork fried rice and egg roll (not as good as Tasty King lunch special) — with the plan to take advantage of free company summer outing food for dinner, and save the other half of free team lunch leftovers for tomorrow. If I work this just right, it will mean that between Friday of last week and Wednesday of this week (inclusive, 6 days), I will have only spent $5.50 of my own cash on food (from Sunday’s Tasty King).
As we were finishing up our free team King Wok lunch, I noticed that boss S still had a healthy chunk of brown rice left in her takeout box and hadn’t touched her vegetable soup. Suddenly she crumples up her napkin and throws it on top of her rice NO! I gasped out loud in blasphemy and quietly whimpered. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I forgot, here” she apologized and took her crumpled napkin off the perfectly good leftover brown rice and gave me her untouched soup. Then we proceeded to get into a full team discussion as to whether I was starved as a child and if that’s how I became so poverexic. Truth is, my mother – typical Asian mother – always strongly discouraged me from finishing my plate because she didn’t want me to get fat, so in retaliation – as the terribly disobedient child that I was – I actively trained myself to always clean my plate, and others’ plates too while I was at it. (Despite that, I was still incredibly skinny as a child.)
Three hours later we were leaving for the annual company summer outing — dumbest event ever except I knew there was guaranteed promise of free food and drinks. Last year’s summer outing was a boat cruise from Chelsea Piers, which in retrospect was much better than this year’s summer outing, which was at the Head of New York Office’s house in New Rochelle. NEW ROCHELLE. I don’t even know where the fuck that is nor do I give a shit — all I know is that it’s not in Manhattan and we have to take a one-hour bus ride out there (and it wasn’t even a party bus). My anxiety level went sky high as I went farther and farther away from Manhattan (like that one time S dragged us all the way out to Harlem for the at-first-nonexistent fried chicken place), combined with the added anxiety that they hadn’t even told us what was going to be served at this outing. I was terrified the food was going to be just mediocre and I was going to deeply regret going out to New Rochelle, but luckily despite the gross location the food was pretty incred — shrimp cocktail, bruschetta, crudite, really good watermelon mojitos, tuna tartare wrapped in cucumber, chunks of steak on potato chip with capers, mini pulled pork sandwiches, mini lobster rolls, BLT on a chip, sesame chicken, beignets, etc etc.
This is going to be a great week. $5.50 in 6 days. Yesssss.
Poverexic in NYC 