The sandwich of sin.

Many years ago on a Friday night of drinking, we lads staggered into Subway to get some needed sustenance. My Irish-descended pal I'll call Jim got his favorite, the roast beef with all the toppings. He was a big man, and hungry. We all sat down to dig in. Just as Jim was about to tuck the end of that delicious meaty hoagie into his chewing apparatus, a mutual (and Jewish) friend said, "I thought you weren't supposed to eat meat on Fridays in Lent."

Jim froze in shock, and started to make frustrated alarm noises like a man having a seizure of some kind -- an angry seizure, that is. He'd either forgotten it was Lent or thought it was Saturday. He dropped his food with disgust.

This story is not that story, although they both involve takeout sandwiches and Lent. This is how I stole a sandwich during this solemn season. It did not happen in my misspent youth, as with Jim's misfortune; it happened Sunday night. 

 

The Sandwich of Shame

This time the place was Panera, not Subway. We like their sandwiches and soup, the latter especially on a cold day, as Sunday was. The only problem is that they keep screwing up orders. Every sandwich has a lot of components, and my wife likes to exercise options on the ingredients, so while I'm very careful about what is in the order I place, they have not always been so careful about what they actually put on the sandwich. Maybe their system is too complicated for a fast-food place. I have to say I've seldom seen the same employees in there twice. Big turnover means constant training and endless rookie mistakes. 

This time, we got someone else's sandwich in addition to the ones I ordered. 

I didn't check order as I often do, so I didn't find out until I got home. Then I felt bad. The Panera is not close to our house, so there didn't seem to be any point to driving back; by now they'd have had to make a new sandwich for the person whose food I got. If I reported the error with apologies to the Panera site, it would just expose the employee to reprimand. I guess I could have run out in the street and handed the sandwich to a homeless guy, but one of the key points of living in suburbia is that one is not surrounded by mendicants at all hours of the day. Also, it was a little late, and even the bums would have eaten by that time.

So I put it in the fridge and ate it for lunch on Monday. No point in compounding my shame by wasting perfectly good food. Yes, I felt a little guilty, but I also felt full, which helps ease the inflamed conscience.