Rambling Rhodes

Cutting All Ties

Okay, I'm not one for small talk. In fact, I think my skills when it comes to inter-personal communication have been deeply hindered by a combination of Web-based communication tools and a 9-5 office job with little interaction with actual, you know, PEOPLE. I'm most comfortable communicating via keyboard. Stephan Hawking has his voice synthesizer, I have MSN Messenger.

It goes beyond that, of course. I'm hyper-sensitive to ambient noise, so more often than not I miss over half of what's being said directly to my face because my focus is on that strange thumping noise coming from the wall 30 feet away. Because, seriously, what the hell is that noise? It's driving me CRAZY!

Anyway, all this is a segue into my sandwich purchasing experience at Subway last night, wherein the Sandwich Artist working the counter was one of those incessant chatter-boxes I've grown to know and dread.

For most people, perhaps 80 percent of the population, when you say "hey, how's it going?" you get the standard "Not bad; yourself, Rose McGowan?"

So, when I said "hey, how's it going?" to the Sandwich Artist last night and got back--complete with a dramatic stretching and rolling of the shoulders--"Oh, could be better; I went snowshoeing today, and I'm really sore."

Crap.

Okay, I had a chit-chatter Sandwich Artist. Unfortunately, there was also a television tuned to some news program, and a couple sitting directly behind me discussing the possibility of getting a puppy which, honestly, was far more compelling than any narrative about snowshoeing could possibly be. My pathetic attention was torn asunder in three different directions.

Now, I have this thing when somebody is trying to talk directly to me, but I'm not really following, because there was apparently a storm front moving in and there are all the pros and cons about getting a black labradour retriever. And the thing is, if I'm not following the person trying to talk directly to me, I go ahead and pretend I got every word perfectly.

The tricky thing about pretending you heard everything perfectly, when in fact you absorbed only about 40 percent, is it's up to you to hold up your end of the conversation based on less than half the information required to conjure a coherent response. Oh, sure, I can occasionally get away with "you got that right," or "I hear ya," or "storm front's moving in," but I've developed an unfortunate tendency to just chortle a little laugh in the hopes the person said something even remotely a little bit funny.

This is a double-edged sword. On the one sharp edge, perhaps the person did, in fact, say something they think is funny, and my laugh has emboldened them to spout more inane blather I'll have to respond to. On the other sharp edge, they could have just told me their significant other died the other day, so my laugh is completely inappropriate, and now I've deeply insulted the person PREPARING MY FOOD!

In the case of last night's Sandwich Artist, my laugh was of the emboldening variety, so he continued to go on and on about. . . I have no idea what. Eventually, the conversation came back to something I was actually focused on: my sandwich. I had ordered a foot long Roma Ciabatta, something something, and I said "you don't need to cut it." I've said this to every Sandwich Artist I've ever encountered, going back more than ten years now.

For some reason, Sandwich Artists have been trained, almost to an instinctive level, to slice footlong sandwiches into two equal parts. I have no idea why this is. Personally, I prefer an intact, non-bifurcated hoagie. That's just my preference. And, so long as I instructed the Sandwich Artist to hold their slicing hand at the appropriate time, I've never had any problem getting an intact sandwich.

Until last night.

ME: That looks good. And you don't need to cut it.

SANDWICH ARTIST: Actually. . . I do.

This had never happened before. I was being second guessed by an over-talkative Sandwich Artist. Of course, at first I did my little chortle laugh, which was basically a kind of conversational place-holder while I considered my next verbal move. Of course, in that precious interval, my sandwich was evenly clove in two.

ME: Why do you have to cut it?

SANDWICH ARTIST: It's easier to eat this way.

Now, admittedly, I'm not a certified Sandwich Artist; I don't know all there is to know about the secret world of the hoagie. But, I think it's fair to say I've sampled both sliced and un-sliced sandwiches and detected no quantifiable differential in their relative ease of edibleness.

In fact, if anything, I think a sliced sandwich may be slightly less easier to eat because, depending on the point of slicification, the ingredients (I'm thinking mainly tomatoes here) can sometimes be cut at odd points, meaning they can actually fall out of the sandwich before it even reaches your mouth because they've been hewn apart and have no significant hold to the rest of the sandwich. I think you all know what I'm talking about here.

I know this sounds strange, but the moment that Sandwich Artist drove his knife into my sandwich, he also drove a deep wedge into any possibility we'd ever eventually be friends. Just minutes before, I was 40 percent willing to listen to his snowshoeing experience; but at the instant of slicing, I wanted nothing more to do with the presumptuous, knife-weilding Sandwich Artist. He was less an "Artist" to me than he was a mere sandwich assassin.

In fact, I don't think I'll ever go to that particular Subway store ever again.

So there.

UPDATED: This post has been slightly edited to make certain non-bloggers of the world happy.

Posted by Ryan at March 6, 2007 11:17 AM | TrackBack