It was something of a coincidence, that Pierre’s 18th birthday fell on the same day as the firm’s centenary celebration dinner. Pierre hadn’t thought to attend, given his poor track record of demonstrating how to worry friends and irritate people for his first three months on the job. However the celebration’s coordinator Ron Shirkin talked Pierre into buying a ticket with a false promise that he’d get a special mention on the night. That was how Ron perceived it, but Pierre couldn’t have cared about his birthday, and had just given in under pressure.

Margaret found Pierre had been seated at her table on the night, dressed in a period piece suit as per the dinner’s theme of emulating the fashions of the time of the company’s formation 100 years earlier. Pierre clowned around at the table, posing for comedic photography shots with a woman from another department in whom he had no interest at all, purely for the sake of passing the time, while Margaret’s boredom reached an all time low.

Pierre’s vocational ineptitude worked most effectively with his supervisor Alene Sirley’s poor communication of instructions to see him frequently in trouble and subsequently denied the right to ‘argue’ his case. This would account for much of his difficulty in making a good impression on the company, but didn’t excuse the selfish way he clung to his old schoolboy approach to work at Margaret’s expense on a daily basis.

One day she found herself sitting opposite him around a table in the top floor canteen at lunch time. She looked at the large pile of salad and meat on her plate and said aloud, “I get called Rabbit, because I like to eat a lot.”

Her mouth went to work on the entire assortment in a dainty manner, without seeming hurried or greedy, and conversation continued, with Pierre making no contribution whatsoever to the dialogue.

A few days later, the canteen began a buffet special which would run every Friday, under the banner ‘all you can eat.’

Her nickname was unofficially contested, when Pierre ate more than her to begin with, and then took his plate back for seconds.

The canteen staff told him that second helpings weren’t part of the deal.

“Then it should say ‘all you can fit on your plate’,” said Pierre.

The following Friday, the buffet was billed accordingly with appropriate signage, and Pierre adapted far more rapidly to this change in circumstances than he had ever managed to adjust his secretarial approach to the requirements of her department.

Something cognizant of a miniature model of Mount Everest adorned his plate, as he set it down on the table, piled high enough to accommodate as much food as possible, while barely avoiding a culinary avalanche which would have worn out several paper towels by the time the table had been cleaned.

“Gluttony is one of the seven deadly enemies of mankind!” said a middle-aged clerk at their table, “The buffet price wouldn’t cover what you have there.”

Margaret had nothing to say. The elegant empress of eating had been far surpassed in one lunch break by the prime prince of pigs.