Lunch Break at Subway

A grim rationalist finds himself patronizing an international sandwich franchise.

I’m waiting in line between equally empty customers, the timer of the lunch break bomb clicking down, idly eyeing the menu for options better than our previous choices, though we inevitably resort to the latter. An assembly of economically disenfranchised people, usually of the same nationality — in this case Sri Lanken(?)  — wear head caps and latex gloves, as if the open sandwiches before them were a surgical procedure gone wrong. The dim glazed look in their eyes is somewhere in between “I don’t give a fuck,” “[what] the fuck,” and “need job.”

The “6-inch Sub” is an incidental sandwich derived from the more aggressively marketed “five pound footlong” after cut in half, implicating the faith Subway has in their employees’ knife abilities, though I am less than certain. I, following the social contract of amicability, order with a rhetorical question: “Can I have a 6-inch tuna sub on a honey oat?” I’ve answered enough follow-up questions in the past to include the main filling and type of bread with my order, by this stage I'm pretty much a pro at ordering my sandwich. I closely watch my random Sri Lanken(?) perhaps too confidently cut a 12″ bun into two theoretically 6″ buns — key word “theoretically,” because it’s really, from my vantage point behind the glass shield, like a 5?” and 7?” bun. And yes, because the Universe has been against me since that rainy night I was born, I get the former, shorter bun. “I ordered a six inch sub, not a five-and-three-eighths-inch sub,” I hear myself saying inside my head, that place of warm solo contemplation. I just look over and smile pathetically.

The woman in front of me asks for extra slices of cheese, saying don’t worry she will pay for it. The Sri Lanken(?) (at least I think they are Sri Lanken, and no I will not apologize for this) puts an extra layer of cheese with the “the fuck?” look. Meanwhile, my sandwich surgeon asks if I want my inferior-length sandwich toasted, to which I answer “sure.” Toasting will turn a “to go” sandwich into a “for here” one, adding extra to the final price. This is okay. I only live once, a hard working  bureaucrat with two jobs who deserves warm and toasty. I deserve this.

The stress test comes at the end, where one is asked to select the toppings. I feel sorry for the person at this station. Raining meat in the valley of bun is easy. Toasting is nothing. But this shit is getting complicated. Many people, including me, employ the subtractive exclusion method (i.e. “everything except [items not to be included].”) Of the choices lettuce; tomatoes; cucumbers; red onions; sliced pickles; black olives; and jalapeños, I choose everything except black olives and jalapeños. It’s hard to explain. Everyone is different. I just feel the olives are rubbery and without any flavor; and I find the heat of the jalapeños distracting. I’m not fond of lettuce, especially their bun dampening capacity, but I like to get my money’s worth.

I am surprised and disappointed when the “extra cheese” woman in front of me remains reticent about the extra cheese when she tells the cashier what she ordered. The particular Subway I patronize operates under a “faith based” system where the customer dutifully reports the type of sandwich to the cashier. Besides the obvious length, the internal constituents which affect pricing (i.e. toastedness, cheese, the excessive “extra meat”) are securely wrapped and visually obscured. This is less a generosity of Subway towards their patrons than negligence on the part of their employees, who are probably instructed to relay facts about the sandwich which have fiscal implications.

“Toasted 6-inch tuna,” I say to the cashier, pointing out the tuna just for good measure, if she were curious. The change I hand over is tossed into the till, making a shallow clink, for there isn’t the buffer of notes to mask the cheapness of the preceding customers. The cashier looks at me with a kind of learned hollowness that came from too many years of not being looked at. Her eyes are soured and hurt, but still warm, and I hold onto that. Waiting at the stop sign on my way back to the shopping centre, I hold my small transparent bag, sporadically tinted with their logo, by its weak handles rendered from two simple holes. The working man’s fiver is smoothened out by tired hands. Hunger is a great industry. Every Napoleon is a possible footlong. The World is doing just fine. I carry my 5?” sandwich back to the canteen of my workplace, carefully unwrap it, and proceed to turn it — as I have been doing with my entire life — into a kind of warm personal metaphor.