Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Angry Sandwich Artist Just Wants to Make Your Sandwich

I had a strange, slightly disturbing experience when I ventured out today to buy my lunch, which I haven't done in awhile. I thought it might be good if I wasn't starving all day, since I didn't have any breakfast again. I thought it would be good to go to Subway, and, when I got there, the line was very short, but then the horror began. First of all, it was taking the man a long time to get sandwiches for the one person in line. She ordered two. Then the timer went off for the bread baking in the oven. Steam was streaming from the top of the oven. It smelled really, really, good, and I was really, really hungry. The man, who had thick glasses sliding down his sweaty nose, had small beady eyes that darted around without looking directly at anyone. It seemed like he was getting stressed out. He was probably about five feet tall, and in his late 40s. As the timer went off, he started to take the baked bread out of the oven and place the pans of bread into a glass cabinet. He wore plastic gloves and decided to put an oven mitt over his plastic glove, and take all the bread out of the oven and into the other bread shelf case with one hand. He finally gave that up and put both oven mitts on his plastic-gloved hands. With his back to me, he asked me what I wanted. I had a headache and didn't feel like shouting at him, so I wanted to wait until he was actually facing me, but I didn't answer him fast enough and he was getting impatient because he wanted me to tell him. So I told him what I wanted. As he started making it, I noticed that he used the same plastic gloves he had on under the oven mitts. Maybe I should not have questioned this, and maybe it makes no difference, but I thought, I wonder how clean those plastic gloves are now? Shouldn't he have put new plastic gloves on? Am I really going to want to eat this sandwich after he made it, knowing where these plastic gloves have been? Am I being too picky? I'm really not a picky person, and I've never been particular about cleanliness, but I do tend to wash my hands when I'm cooking in the kitchen every time I touch something different than the food I just cut up or prepared or got on my hands. Maybe these are the early signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder -- it starts gradually, and then I just get more and more particular about everything being in complete order and completely clean. No, no, no .... that could NEVER HAPPEN. Anyway, I boldly yet politely asked him if he thought those gloves were clean. He snapped at me, "Why wouldn't they be?" And then he looked mad. I looked up at the oven mitts resting on top of the bread cabinet, then back down at his gloved hands. He jerked off the gloves and said, "Never mind," in a rough and impatient way, and grabbed a fresh glove. Then I realized a very angry man was going to make my lunch, never mind anymore about whether his plastic gloves were clean. Then I told him, "I think I'll just go somewhere else," suddenly realizing I don't want Angry and Unsanitary Man to get his hands on my roast beef. He said, "No, it's OK." I said, "No, I'll just go somewhere else," and as I walked out the door he was pleading with me not to leave.
Then I got some Chinese take-out, which was really tasty, came with an egg roll and a fortune cookie, and will leave me with leftovers for tomorrow, all for the same price as one sub and a macadamia nut cookie would have been. I was glad I got out of there. But I couldn't help wondering if I was being obsessive-compulsive or not. I don't know what was inside those oven mitts. Maybe an old spot of marinara sauce, maybe bacteria, maybe germs, maybe a little mouse house or spider web, or ... or ... I know, probably nothing.
So, when I got back to work, I polled my co-workers about whether I was rightfully put off by the sandwich artist's plastic glove debacle, whether it could be reasonably categorized as a debacle, and whether it could reasonably be a reason for concern for the well-being of my sandwich, or at least my mental health.
Response from co-worker #1: "I'm all out of Pepsi. I'm going to the Dairy Mart across the street. I like Pepsi."
Response from co-worker #2: "...." (munches silently on her food, as the lunch hour is almost over.)
Me, giving up on the possibility that co-worker #1 will ever be interested in anything I say in casual conversation, and prompting co-worker #2: "Would you have wanted him to make your sandwich?"
Co-worker #2: "I probably would have felt the way you did."
Response from co-worker #3: "Paper or plastic?" (He holds up his new lunch bag, made of recycled materials, from Wal-Mart, and reads the message on the side of the bag.)

Afterthought:
Now that I really think hard about it, at the end of all this writing about my start-and-stop, start-and-stop lunch hour, I believe I was having flashbacks to the days I worked in restaurants and had to take things out of the ovens with the community oven mitts, which, incidentally, were home to a restaurant just across the street at the old and now-defunct steak restaurant. Those mitts were absolutely disgusting inside. Everyone used them, and they never got washed. They were greasy and dirty inside, and old and falling apart. Now I know I'm not crazy. I just have to search inside myself for answers, rather than turn to my co-workers for validation. I'm glad I worked this all out just now.

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