Picture it: you’ve had a crappy morning chock full of meetings and passive aggressive emails, and all you want is to sit down and eat your lunch.

But when you go to get it from the break room, its gone!

Everyone has had their lunch stolen in an office once or twice. It’s one of the risks you take working at an office job.

Not everyone, however, would go to the lengths this user’s office did to find the culprit, including using a blacklight to look for evidence of the workplace crime!

Check it out!

Dirty dirty little lunch thief

This took place when I was still a teen fresh out of university working directly under an engineer.

Well I was lazy and always picked up a lunch from WholeFoods, usually sushi on my way to work.

My floor had its own break room and fridge and for the first 6 months nothing ever went missing.

That is until we got a batch of university interns.

But with the arrival of the interns came an unforgivable transgression.

Then wouldn’t you know lunches would go missing! And it wasn’t just mine.

Any lunch in store packaging was gone if there was a name on it or not.

Well after two weeks of our lunches just walking away we’re all getting annoyed. (Don’t mess with my salmon sashimi.)

All I’m gonna say is if my spicy crab roll got swiped, no one’s leaving until someone fesses up!

One of the engineers comes up with an idea and asks everyone to throw in a couple of dollars to solve this problem.

The following week he sends a text to the store-bought lunch people to meet in the break room before work; and sent a text to everyone in the office to not touch any of the packaged lunches.

We meet up and he hands us this little spray bottle to spray the packaging.

It was this blacklight reactive spray. Glows from a black light but completely undetectable.

The trap had been set, now all that was left to do was wait!

Lunch rolls around and guess what every single packaged lunch is gone.

And this guy brings out a black light and starts looking for fingerprints.

Soon he had a lead…

He found them on the door down the hall to the elevator.

Now imagine 5 of the nerdiest engineers you have ever seen going down a hallway with a black light like something from a discount CSI.

Well there are fingerprints everywhere, right up to the elevator on the buttons down to the 2nd floor.

At this point I figured the interns are nicking our lunches. But I was wrong.

We followed it right to the head of the sales departments desk.

We demand to see his hands and they were glowing like crazy. Not to mention he had touched his face so there was this glowing mess covering his face.

The guy knew he was caught and we made an agreement not to go to HR but to get a picture of his face.

And pizza for our floor every Friday for two months.

But the lunch-thief’ wasn’t getting off that easy!

We stayed late that day to print out the glowing mess that was his face. We printed at least a hundred of them with the caption “Dirty dirty lunch thief.”

Those things went up everywhere: The bathrooms, all the entryways of the building, and every office door and desk in sight.

Needless to say the lunches stopped going missing and I was able to eat my sushi in peace.

Leave it to engineers to solve a problem in the most elaborate yet awesome way possible!

Not to mention hanging up his picture like a mugshot throughout the whole office!

Reddit absolutely ate this story up, much like the lunch thief ate OP’s sushi. This user recalled her own tale of workplace theft.

And this user said she should have given her Sushi a special kick to find the thief!

This man commended the power of public humiliation.

And this user agreed, saying that HR probably would’ve gone easy on him anyway.

And finally, this Redditor shared her own story of red-hot revenge on a lunch-stealer!

Come on people, is it that hard to pack a lunch for yourself?

There’s no excuse to be a dirty lunch thief!

Want to read another story where somebody got satisfying revenge? Check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.