Boss scheduled a potluck to “celebrate” the team’s performance next week.
Our team’s performance was pathetic this year, in large part because our boss pushed a huge portion of the work onto just 2 of us while the other 5 people did who knows what. She changed a bunch of processes and protocols to make herself look good, but the only reason those didn’t horribly backfire on her is extreme luck. Several things she changed did in fact backfire on her, but she’s pushed the blame onto her staff. Myself and another person are on PIPs for BS reasons seemingly to try and push any performance issues onto us.
But anyways, the boss, who gets paid double what I get paid and has seemingly shut down any discussions of staff pay increases, scheduled a potluck and invited like 20 people as a celebration of everyone’s stellar performance because 2 people did the work of 6 people and 16 of those people did the work of 1.
So… what should I bring for this mandatory “fun”?
Edit:
So the potluck is a lunch time potluck, which will eat up my unpaid lunch break and force me to interact with people I hate. It seems like I can’t skip it without potentially being disciplined, but I’m considering taking sick leave that day. (I have an open workplace violence complaint against my boss. Also a bullying and intimidation complaint. Also considering a gender discrimination and hostile work environment complaint against her. I got put on a PIP for supposedly being rude, when I’m just introverted and filed several complaints against my boss for some really messed up stuff. HR has a recording of one of the incidents. She’s known to be retaliatory and cruel, but she’s a friend of the CEO.)
For things to bring, I’m a decent cook, and while I hate cooking now, I take pride in my cooking when I do it, so I can’t purposefully sabotage anything. I also don’t want to bring anything that needs to be refrigerated or reheated because my org announced a few months ago that individual departments need to clean the break room on a rotation because the contract with the cleaning company doesn’t include appliances. I don’t ever use that room, so I don’t want to have to use that room for this stupid potluck because that’d also help them justify having people who never use the room being forced to clean it.
For budget, I honestly want to do it as cheap as possible. Atm I have ingredients to do some stuff, but I’d like to do as minimal spending as possible. For example I could do a vegetarian mapo tofu that will be extremely spicy, or I could make some chilled desserts, but that’d require me to use the break room. (Anything I bring I’ll eat as well.) If I bring something like chips, I can get a big bag from Costco for like $6-7 which would let me avoid using the break room too, but then I’m spending money on these AHs.
So yeah, I’m trying to balance my extreme hatred for the people I work with, my desire to maliciously comply, avoiding using the break room because the org started a stupid policy that turned everyone into janitors regardless of position, and wanting to be as cheap as possible without it being obvious that I’m trying to be as cheap as possible since this boss has a track record of retaliation.
(Also regarding the retaliation, I’m aware she’s breaking the law, I’ve reported her already to HR and outside regulators. But the org I work for is connected and the regulators are corrupt, so until I can either get a mass strike and open letter of all of the corruption and illegal practices to happen or get enough evidence to get an AUSA to actually take me seriously, I need to keep my head down a bit more.)