Free food.
I just wandered down the stairs to my nearest kitchen and found free sandwiches and black forest cake, left over from some meeting or other. I suddenly realised that this hasn’t happened to me since I left my last job, where there’d be free food available every couple of weeks or so.
On the other hand, I’m happy that my current employers appreciate that my job performance is not affected by:
a) wearing jeans
b) turning up a few minutes after 9 am.
Maybe they’ll also let me work from home occasionally, if I ask really, really nicely.
You just need to be in a different lab, or friends with people in a different lab. Our lab has free food at least 2-3 times a week.There’s food every Tuesday, which is our lab meeting day. The MDs occasionally bring food from their clinical meetings. The department faculty lunch meetings usually have leftovers that grad students and postdocs can scavenge. There’s always cake for people’s birthdays (and our lab is big, so there are lots of birthdays). And our lab has lots of bakers who bring in their wares in exchange for the lab’s adulation.
Lucky!!!