Mike O'Neill works in the IT department at the state office complex in St. Paul, which means he's the one who gets the calls when workers who have been eating at their desks discover that their keyboards are clogged with food-related detritus.
"They are disgusting," he said. "Filled with crumbs and sticky — yuck! And of course, there are the times when one of them spills a drink on their laptop. Then it's an emergency I have to deal with."
But he's not lobbying for a ban on eating at office workstations because he also has a confession to make.
"I eat lunch at my desk every day," he said.
Long gone is the two-hour, two-martini lunch that was the mainstay of the 1950s and '60s. Eating lunch at your desk, once considered something done only under unusual circumstances, has become the norm. According to a Gallup Poll, two-thirds of American workers eat at their desks more than once a week.
And not just lunch.
"It's breakfast, too," said Laura Barclay, founder of the Civility & Etiquette Centre. "It's become part of our culture."
The practice also has become a topic of debate in human resources departments looking for common ground between employees who want to eat at their desks and co-workers who object to the practice.