The lunchroom
Silence. Glances. A look away. The gentle setting down of a coffee cup. A surgery plan. A menu plan. Planless colleagues. Tired faces. Faces without expression, as sterile as surgical instruments. Collective knowledge, collective silence. Collective bad mood. Collective unwillingness and commonality in the mutual resentment of some. The hour hand shows no mercy - seven o'clock in the morning.
Okay, five more minutes. Someone starts to take a breath. Another raises an eyebrow questioningly in anticipation of a verbal statement. But only a faint sigh grows out of the supposed intake of breath. The weight of an entire species pours out of it: lost, overwhelmed, burned out, on a wrong turn, exhausted, but always confident in judgment.
The lunchroom - sometimes a depression-made room, an atrium of a burnout. Also filled with sagging faces, all telling each other the same thing: I wish I´d be somewhere else. The lunchroom as the silent eye of a loud hurricane of insanity that we all think is normal. Suppose the central station is a melting pot of its urban society. In that case, the lunchroom is the melting pot of a group, a team, or a workforce of wage-earners who find themselves in a transit point where they can linger briefly for a few moments. A cigarette (at least it used to be), a bite to eat, grumbled banalities to which everyone agrees. Yes, exactly!
Often it also seems that a lunchroom is a place of arrival, the destination of a run-up, which happens on the way to work. The shell we have put on for our everyday professional life and developed over the years, is laid over us layer by layer on the way to the workplace - mental warm-up training for life in the 21st century.
Just having been himself, the colleague, employee, everyday wage earner, just having thrown up in the car about the traffic, scratching himself with pleasure in the most secret places - suddenly latched onto the collective oh and woe with the inevitable question of where it's all supposed to lead, followed by the eternal statement that it can't go on like this.
And yet everyone comes back every day.
- imgae -
Like their occupants, lunchrooms can have different characters, whether in hospitality or medicine. Of course, the dinner lounge of an executive floor on the 102nd floor, where CEOs and ultra-important departmental semi-leaders assure each other of their absolute genius, differs SIGNIFICANTLY from the break room of the chef who cooks and serves these gentlemen (and yes, often there are only gentlemen).
Here we are talking about the latter in particular.
In the industry, which outwardly shines with glittering, shining, clean, tidy, five-star and especially in very new, so-called minimalist-modern houses, with a facade that has degenerated to the point of aesthetic sterility, the employees' lounge has the character of a bum. Everything true for the surface lives its opposite inside. For those who take care of all this eye-pleasing tidiness comes from the dirt.
No matter where in the world restaurateurs work, the locker room that often is part of the lunchroom and shares its charm, the line is fluid, is almost always the same: Between sweaty colleagues' clothes, dirty and stinking of rotten aprons, whose original snow-white can hardly be guessed, on twisted ties lying on the floor, black shoes, white shirts, whose chic seems wrung out of the fabric, along with creased trousers with millions of new, additional wrinkles and under a diffusely flickering, tired ceiling lamp, the cook, the hostess, the waitress, the head waiter, dress up. The dust, the crumbs, the countless scraps of paper, which only twenty-four hours ago were elaborately designed, customer-oriented menu plans, balanced in terms of taste and trimmed for precision, no longer interest anyone, are not noticeable. Instead, it would be apparent if all this were not so.
The conversations in these lounges and changing rooms are ticked-off staccato: How much? - 120 - Fuck. - Extra side dish? - What do you think. - In the evening? - No plan. - Mh... - Max here today? - No. - Shit. - VIP? - Gottschalk's giving a speech. - Aha.
A completely different lunchroom character is cultivated by part of the medical industry. The valley of tears is not quite as deep, or at a different level, and so on - is there perhaps no difference at all in the end? The concern about how things will continue is discussed here more in terms of possibilities because it's clear that things will continue. The way it's going right now is acceptable. The most important thing is that when choosing how to shape the future, elbows are not resting on the table but are hanging sharpened in the air, ready to attack. After all, ideas are needed for the future, and one's own are the best, right after those of colleague Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. whoever. The volume is also different here. With seven people present simultaneously, each can talk to the other without raising his voice. The hierarchy is also softened here for a few moments because the opinion or idea of an assistant is taken just as seriously as that of the biologist/medic. A pleasant thing.
Yes, one can state here completely value-free that the charm of a lunchroom is also oriented to the educational level of its occupants. In the latter, it happens relatively rarely that a white-dressed crazier with black buttons in the jacket suddenly opens the door and screams Which idiot has put the lamb's lettuce on the employers buffet? It's for the conference!
It is also quite pleasing that earning a wage is perceived here less or not as a burden of life that can hardly be managed. Yes, there are exhausting phases here, too, but for some people, those more challenging periods are not a knee-breaking but a wing-giving one. This way, new things are created that are wanted, and questions such as "What if we add quality assurance at that point of the process?" are allowed. In contrast, in other sectors, the question "Isn't it time to renew the layout of the menu cards?" is answered with a mature "What's that all about? We've had them like that for over twenty years!". To point out that this was the reason for the question would be a waste of time and effort.
In another medical field, the contrast between the ideas of a healthy diet and the foods available can sometimes hit you like a stroke. Suppose laziness won out the day before about a self-cooked and pre-cooked, transportable lunch. In that case, you´re left with a choice between Mars, Twix, Duplo, Ritter Sport, Snickers, Knoppers, Bounty, Hanuta, chocolate milk, banana milk, strawberry milk, and Red Bull.
Sometimes the question arises here, at some point, whether the hospital industry is somehow connected to the confectionery industry. The one breeds the customers for the others, making them patients for the first. Wonderful!
Things are also colorful here. One person is leafing through a study on the question, "Can meditation mitigate a surgeon's ego in tablet form over a period of 72.4 years?", while another is bent over a funny paperback book from Disney, laughing and blowing the breadcrumbs through the air because Donald Duck is particularly funny again today. Oh, this social diversity. I wonder which one is the Ph.D.?
There are little lunchrooms, long, narrow, wide, large, small, seated, tabled, empty, completely rotten, alive, and even palm-lined, for example, on cruise ships. They are indeed plastic palm trees, but this unattractive marginal information only matters to the brain. The eye doesn't care.
Although everyone on board of a cruise ship works on average ten hours a day, seven days a week, there is NO complaining here.
Maybe it's because of the lack of German colleagues, because the typical Asian, who by default has a contract not for six but for ten months, seems to be more at peace with himself than the grumpy German, who still finds a hair in the food when there is no more food left, while the American tummy has long been rewarded with stroking because it was sooo delicious. And that even though the majority of the hard-earned dollars of the typical Asian are for the family, which has a vague idea of the existence of the father, husband, son, and sibling at the other end of the world.
Anyway, these lunchrooms are among the best, should there be good ones at all. From the portholes, you can see sandy beaches, mountains, natural palm trees, or breaking waves slapping against the ship's side in a strong swell. Pure pleasure and a significant change from the daily monotony. Also, all the multilingual entertainment rounds at large and small fixed tables are pleasant and not at all intrusive. Even though the colleague from Jakarta can shout his opinion with at least the same energy as a mug-armed, tie-dyed, would-be CEO who is loudly trying to achieve world domination on the second floor of the Käfer tent at the Munich Oktoberfest, he rarely raises his voice. He converses calmly and serenely with his colleague from Thailand. Beautiful.
The lunchroom can be the core of life experiences. It can be a space of insight, sorrow, grief, joy, and motivation. Sometimes even a chill-out room with beach chairs, as at Dallmayr's flagship store in Munich. Above all, however, the lunchroom offers endless opportunities, everywhere and at any time, to conduct comprehensive and well-founded social research on the hard front of the unvarnished daily work routine. Sociologists would have a ball.
Bon appetit!