Augh. The cafeteria needed to prepare for the building-wide holiday social that was being held this afternoon...so they closed at 11am. Prior to that they had carryout sandwiches and salads, but who eats lunch before 11am?! The e-mail announcing the 11am closure had not mentioned sandwiches and salads at all, so I didn't even realize they wouldn't have those after 11. Most people in the building can go out for lunch, but contractors have to park in a separate parking lot that requires a shuttlebus trip just to reach our cars...so the few hundred contractors in the building essentially can't leave for lunch unless a federal employee or military person drives them.

This wouldn't have been so bad if there were other options, but the cafeteria is pretty much the only eatery in the building...we're not within walking distance of anything. There are two snack bars at opposite ends of the building, and they usually have sandwiches and salads, but the one at my end of the building didn't have anything vegetarian at all. I thought about getting a package of Cheerios, but they didn't even have any skim milk! So I walked down to the other end of the building (good exercise, but took up a lot of time; I had a meeting coming up and I had to eat beforehand) and got in the huge line. The snack bars are small to begin with, and they're crammed full of stuff, so there wasn't much room to move around and the line extended out into the hall. They had three vegetarian choices: an egg salad sandwich on a croissant, an egg salad sandwich on a long sub roll, and a peanut butter sandwich on regular wheat bread. I chose the peanut butter sandwich and also got some raw veggies with ranch dip. WW says a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is 7 points...bleah. That's three times what I normally have for my main lunch.

I avoided the holiday social completely. There were fancy treats and cookies there, and I already went through all that on Tuesday. I just didn't go down there this time. My coworker did, but fortunately he ate whatever he got before coming back to our cube.