Comedy of modern manners no 34: the sarnie shop.
What to do for lunch when working for a living can be a social minefield.
Sensible working stiffs will either bring their own scran for lunchtime consumption or have a canteen on site, which avoids the problem.
There's also the middle-ground cheat of the filled baguette and bag of crisps from the people who wander office-parks without let or hindrance from the security types.
The rest of us face a number of problems in re. selection of grub-destination.
There's the lunchtime pie-and-pint option. On the upside, it gets you out of the building and means you don't mumble crumbs into your keyboard and clag up yr mouse with mustard mayo while staring glumly at the Guardian website (or FaceAche or Ebay). On the downside, being the sort of person who downs a pint (or a vase of merlot) with a fried lunch (or a lard-slathered 'salad') pretty much went out with regular telly appearances for Mike Yarwood.
There's the option of the same thing from the same place until it's shut by the council, you get made redundant or you die. Ideal for those who've given up hope or look at food as an inconvenience at best to be fitted in while there's a long compile.
Or one can wander out of the workplace and potter about the town until something catches one's stomach.
(This assumes, of course, that you're not stuck on some hateful office-park where the nearest not-office is a branch of Spearmint Rhino or some olde-worlde Weatherspoons-lite shitehole of a 'pub')
The thing is that it seems a bit off to wander back past the other sarnie shops with your lunchtime trophy clutched in one hand. It's like you're rubbing their noses in the fact that you're seeing other sarnie shops, and it's more than a chap can stand to see a disappointed face looming over the baked-spud oven as you hurry past, pointedly looking in the other direction. You want to burst into the place and go "Yes, I know, but their chicken-and-bacon baguettes mean nothing to me. And the bagel shop was a one-time thing, really. It's just that... I need different experiences, and I've grown and changed as a person since that thing with the pastie shop. Surely you can see that?"
At which point the police are called.
Sensible working stiffs will either bring their own scran for lunchtime consumption or have a canteen on site, which avoids the problem.
There's also the middle-ground cheat of the filled baguette and bag of crisps from the people who wander office-parks without let or hindrance from the security types.
The rest of us face a number of problems in re. selection of grub-destination.
There's the lunchtime pie-and-pint option. On the upside, it gets you out of the building and means you don't mumble crumbs into your keyboard and clag up yr mouse with mustard mayo while staring glumly at the Guardian website (or FaceAche or Ebay). On the downside, being the sort of person who downs a pint (or a vase of merlot) with a fried lunch (or a lard-slathered 'salad') pretty much went out with regular telly appearances for Mike Yarwood.
There's the option of the same thing from the same place until it's shut by the council, you get made redundant or you die. Ideal for those who've given up hope or look at food as an inconvenience at best to be fitted in while there's a long compile.
Or one can wander out of the workplace and potter about the town until something catches one's stomach.
(This assumes, of course, that you're not stuck on some hateful office-park where the nearest not-office is a branch of Spearmint Rhino or some olde-worlde Weatherspoons-lite shitehole of a 'pub')
The thing is that it seems a bit off to wander back past the other sarnie shops with your lunchtime trophy clutched in one hand. It's like you're rubbing their noses in the fact that you're seeing other sarnie shops, and it's more than a chap can stand to see a disappointed face looming over the baked-spud oven as you hurry past, pointedly looking in the other direction. You want to burst into the place and go "Yes, I know, but their chicken-and-bacon baguettes mean nothing to me. And the bagel shop was a one-time thing, really. It's just that... I need different experiences, and I've grown and changed as a person since that thing with the pastie shop. Surely you can see that?"
At which point the police are called.