Monday, January 18, 2010

the importance of cheese

I am anal retentive. I know this, and usually make something of an effort not to impose it on others.

I try not to be one of 'those' customers, so I limit my special requests when I eat out. Specifically, I only ask the specially trained sandwich experts at Subway to "please pick through, and give me tomatoes that aren't green". They do that for me. Sometimes it means that they have to go to the back of the store and get another bowl of pre-sliced tomatoes, so I feel as though I'm pushing my luck to ask any more of them.

That leaves the cheese.

They put all of cheese on the bun so that the big end of the triangle is facing the crease of the bun. Flipping half of the cheese triangles would result in full coverage of the sandwich, but they face all of the cheese slices in the same direction. That leaves cheese overlaps and blank spaces on the sandwich.

It's a whole ball of wrong, I tell you.

I considered not getting tomatoes in order to free up my one special request. The problem is, "Please flip the cheese so that it's more evenly dispersed" makes feel both geeky and high maintenance, as well as anal retentive.

I'm just learning to accept the anal retentiveness. I'm not ready to embrace geeky and high maintenance quite yet.

And so I say nothing. I accept a sandwich with faulty cheese placement; which totally messes with my chi, and leaves me with no choice but to soothe my frustrations with chocolate.

And that's how I've developed an addiction to Subway's M&M cookies. Surely, I can't be the only one.

Come to think of it, that's probably how they get away with charging so much for their cookies.

As a marketing scheme, it's actually kind of brilliant.

4 comments:

  1. Honey, you go right ahead and ask for it exactly the way you want it. The interesting customers are the ones that help make the day go by a little quicker, after all. Who could mind that?

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  2. I embrace my Sally Albright when it comes to food and I like to think of it a meticulous not anal retentive.

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  3. It's ok. How a sandwich is made i.e. the placement of items in relation to each other and which side of the bread has mayo or mustard and how the sandwich is sliced seems to have a great affect on the taste of sandwiches made in our country kitchen. And talk about anal(meticulous is much better linlah), I have a huge problem with 'affect' and 'effect'. I checked out the usage and I am still befuddled.

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  4. You guys are awesome.

    RR - my chemistry teacher had "Effect = To have an Affect" written on the wall of his classroom. All these years, I believed him but I just looked it up:

    Affect - to act on or influence
    Effect - to bring about or accomplish.

    My conclusion? I think they mean the same thing.

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