My witty neighbor Sebastian has a term for it: al desko.
That gives it some much-needed panache, but in the end, it's still just you and your ham-and-swiss-on-rye, at your desk and on the job rather than out for a midday meal at a restaurant with friends or colleagues. Chalk it up as yet another sign of a dying civilization, but polls show that nearly 60 percent of workers lunch al desko these days.
And that sad fact, I'm convinced, is why Baltimore's Ad Club is going to be celebrating its 100th anniversary next year as an exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society, rather than as a living, breathing and lunching group.
The Ad Club - officially the Advertising Club of Baltimore, although its members eventually would come from beyond that profession - is one of those late, great organizations that used to dominate a city's civic life. But like so many civic groups, from the Rotary to the Kiwanis clubs, its membership numbers waned as times changed, people got busier with their own lives and, perhaps most of all, people started connecting online rather than in person.
In other words, Facebook and MySpace have replaced the weekly lunches, the annual banquets and the social networking of the Ad Club.
Well, not entirely, at least in the minds of those who value the kind of in-person gatherings that characterized the club, which faded away two years ago.
"There's never been anything like it before and never anything like it again," Kip Mandris says wistfully. "It unified the whole city."
Mandris, a PR guy, bar owner and man-about-town, is a former Ad Club president and still its chief torchbearer. We are - wonder of wonders! - lunching in a restaurant. There are tablecloths and waiters filling my water glass and no computer keyboard or piles of paper or half-cups of now-cold morning coffee like at my usual lunch spot - my desk.
Mandris has always had it in his head to try and revive the club, but now is working instead on a more realistic plan - to create an exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society's museum that will capture the Ad Club's role in the city's social fabric.
To page through a history of the club that the members put together some year back is to revisit a lost world, one in which the city's movers and shakers gathered regularly to schmooze, hear guest speakers like Dr. Jonas Salk and honor local luminaries like Johnny Unitas, Joseph Meyerhoff and William Donald Schaefer and national figures like Milton Berle, Andy Griffith and Walter Cronkite.
