The Best Healthy Snack Gift Box

So, the new boss is a pretty cool character. I don’t just mean the healthy snack gift basket thing; she’s really cool generally. There’s the one weird thing obviously, but it’s not that big a deal, she’s got the potato filter on. None of us said anything because she did all the talking, and she was explaining in the Zoom meeting about how she’s not really a ‘tech’ person and all that, so we guess that’s it. Maybe she has kids, and they’re messing around with her or whatever, who knows? She was saying she wants to be back in the office, physical space and the sound of keyboards clacking and all that stuff. It’s not so great to work at home, it makes the home your workplace, so there’s no actually going home if you get me? Anyway, she’s done the rest of us all pretty good. A healthy snack gift box sent out to everyone on the team as a welcome? Thank Bezos for Amazon is all I can say! The delivery person dropped off one for each of us on the day of our introductory Zoom meet where we all got to say hello and introduce ourselves. Everyone was excited they’d got the snack box, going on about gift ideas for other people and how important it is to be healthy during lockdown. She was very self-effacing about it, "They don't pay us enough" she said, so she got us all one as a welcome. By the time we were well in it didn’t seem worth mentioning the potato thing. She’s got a filter on? So what? I sometimes put on the rollercoaster and wave my arms around to break the ice in our brainstorming sessions. We’re a relaxed company, that’s all there is to it.

After she sent us the healthy snacks, I found I got really into them. I’ve always been a sugar man myself, but I used to cycle everywhere and those days are gone now we’re in the time of COVID. So when I received a healthy gift baskets for him it was just the health boost I needed. I’ve been looking into healthy homemade snacks that I can make myself, cheaper than adding ‘healthy snacks to buy’ to my shopping list I can tell you. While I’m hard at it the house smells of baking chickpeas and these crazy little sesame cakes the boss was telling me the recipe for. She says they’re great healthy snacks for kids and I’m well into them. Candy is now off the menu! The boss is still decked out with the potato filter, she’s so nice I don’t see the point in asking about it really. Everyone else says they’re just taking it in their stride, lockdown is weird and stressful so if people want to lighten the mood, they should do that. I meant to ask her where the filter comes from though, it looks very convincing compared to a lot of those filters. Almost real even.

I cannot fault the boss, wouldn’t if I could as she sent out more of these healthy snack gift baskets for adults to everyone yesterday as a thank you for meeting our recent deadlines. Healthy snack gift basket and a snazzy gift box aside, the filter thing is weird. It’s obviously deliberate, as the one she’s using has changed. She’s now a potato with sproutings coming out of her head, so she looks like she’s a spud that’s rolled to the back of the cupboard and been forgotten about as it ‘returns to nature’. She even made a reference to it, that we all laughed at because it was funny actually; her saying ‘excuse my sproutings, I haven’t had time to sort myself out before the Zoom call,’ so she obviously keeps the filter on deliberately, I guess. We all laughed, and people were quick to say how grateful they were for the healthy food gift box we each received. I piped up actually, asking where she gets her filters from, but she just said she doesn’t use them. Her comic timing was amazing, it was an instant response and the delivery was believably deadpan. If you couldn’t see the sproutings and whatnot yourself then you’d believe her.

I really want to meet the boss in person. We all do, everyone mentions how great she is in the private chats and there’s never any complaining about her, which is insane for a boss, to be honest. We clubbed together and got her a healthy surprise box as a gift the other day, it seemed the right thing to do after how cool she’s been over the last year and a bit. Lockdown is something that I’m yet to get used to, but I’m more adjusted to that than the concept of a boss who isn’t a slavedriver (even if she is a potato, it appears?) so a snack box gift that we all paid for between us is hardly a big deal. Someone suggested we set her up with subscription boxes, where Amazon sends out a healthy snack gift box delivered once a month, or whatever, but not everyone had the cash and it sounded like a pain sorting the payment between us all, so just the one healthy gift box for Mrs. Potato head. Karen called her that the other day and the boss gave her a funny look. Maybe she isn’t married?

I miss cycling. I still do it for exercise, but it was great cycling to work each day, instead of just getting up and BOOM: You’re now at work. Getting sent a healthy food gift basket every so often is awesome, with a tasty healthy treat inside, but I’m Googling diets and stuff like hot healthy snacks for weight loss more and more as staying at home to avoid the plague is making my waistline swell. Not that it matters right now, all I wear these days are sweatpants but you get me? Lockdown is due to lift pretty soon and we’re all going to a restaurant to meet the boss for the first time. Properly anyway, I feel like I’ve known her forever but only with a potato filter that’s permanently on, and only through a Zoom window. We got onto diets anyway, she helped us sort some gift boxes for vegetarians that work with the company and we were asking her if she was going to eat some fries, or if she worried about being baked, and she seemed a little upset actually. She’s booked a restaurant that doesn’t serve potatoes anyway. ‘Obviously,’ she said. Weird right?

I have never felt so bad in my entire life. None of us have.  We’ve been making all these potato puns when we’re around the boss, cracking jokes and the rest, and not one of us has thought to check if it might be insensitive. I just assumed it was a filter, but our boss is actually a potato! We were at the restaurant, chattering about the healthy snacks gift pack and gourmet gift baskets healthy gift basket things Karen has got into, kind of like a veggie gift basket, but they’re organic and come with extra protein snacks and whatever when the boss walked in. She had those red shoes and the bendy arms that you stick in the sides. I actually did a doubletake, I think everyone did. All you see on a screen is the face, all we saw was her face anyway, and that filter is popular so it made sense to assume, right? But no, the boss is actually a potato. A living, breathing potato. Karen looked pale, she was making that ‘baked in an oven’ joke not too long ago, and that’s really potatoist, right? This is the problem so many of us have these days, we just assume we’re right and don’t stop to check our privilege. I cringed, seriously.

I wanted the earth to swallow me up at the meal (is it OK to say that given potatoes come from the earth?) but everything is fine, our potato boss is awesome about the mix-up and doesn’t want us to worry. She’s taken it in her stride, work is still going well and the meal was awesome. Phew! I’d thought for a second it was time to start furiously searching online for healthy snack gift ideas and healthy gift baskets for same-day delivery as a means of apologizing, which would have been stupid because we were in a restaurant, but everything was fine after the initial surprise. The food was great, and Potatoina (our boss’ real name) was even better in real life than online. Karen was really quiet at first, clearly embarrassed, but Potatoina made her feel alright about things and drew her out. It turned out it was Karen’s husband’s birthday, and Potatoina came up with all these healthy snack box ideas about getting treat gift baskets for him. We all loved eating out together, it’s too bad that it’s time to go back into lockdown again now really, I’m thinking I might sell the bicycle and buy one of those Pelotons instead. I hope you can get filters for them, but maybe not potato ones!