> I have a bunch of Swedish friends who all came back from work trips to Norway, cursing, because the &¤#&#"&"# Norwegians would schedule meetings over lunch, a

> I have a bunch of Swedish friends who all came back from work trips to Norway, cursing, because the &¤#&#"&"# Norwegians would schedule meetings over lunch, and then everyone else would just pull up their /¤#&"&!"#&#" matpakke in the middle of the meeting, while my friends were stuck with nothing to eat, because they were used to taking a break, going out, sitting down, eating lunch, and then going back to the office. Instead, they had to sit and starve in meetings. That sounds extremely odd. I'm 44 years old, and I've lived and worked in Norway for most of my professional career and have had numerous jobs, but I've never experienced anything like what you describe. On the rare locations when a long meeting or workshop extends through lunch ours, there is either a lunch break where we all go out somewhere to eat, or we get lunch delivered to to everyone in the meeting room. The packed lunch seems to me to be almost exclusively a school thing. At workplaces, only a few people near retirement age or people with very strict dietary requirements bring their own lunches.