The Chill Line

Some people think they’re “better” than those of us who worked in food service. I never figured out why, but they just automatically thought they were inherently more able and smarter than the people who were making the food they held so close to them, and sometimes you just have to roll with it.

People could be asses. Though, for every rude soccer mom who whined about putting her mayonnaise underneath her veggie patty, there were at least three really polite folks who made it all worthwhile.

One day, it was the worst rush I ever had to go through. There was a line out the door, and me, my manager, and another coworker (he was a big and tall guy who liked to talk about video games) were frantically scrambling around, trying to fulfill everyone’s orders the best we could. We even planted a newer guy on the cash register so that he could get to know the register, even if he was totally new to it.

I had memorized all the sandwiches at that point and I felt like I actually had a place on the sandwich artist line. But one lady kind of knocked me down a peg, honestly. She was on the older side of middle-aged, and she had her daughter with her, a pale-blonde girl who looked like the kind of white troubled hipster you’d read about in a teen romance novel about heterosexual rebels who fall in love.

My manager was taking care of the front of the line, starting out orders and passing them down onto me and my gamer coworker, where we’d put veggies on the subs. A ham sandwich was suddenly in front of me and I raised my voice to ask, “What else on your ham sandwich?” to get the owner’s attention.

The old hag in front of me shook her head in disappointment, frantic, and she tapped on the glass with a manicured bony finger. “I can’t eat that. Who cut that? You cut it like this on one side,” she held her hands out close together, “and this on the other.” To illustrate again, she widened the gap between her hands. “I want another sandwich.”

My heart racing to pump cold blood to my trembling fingers, I choked out a, “Sorry, ma’am, I’ll start another one,” and I turned around to powerwalk back to the bread cabinet. Another footlong ham with American cheese, not toasted.

My manager stopped me in my tracks and whipped her head around at the sight of me apologizing. “What’re you doin’, Osh? What’s goin’ on?”

“She wanted another sandwich. That one was cut wrong,” I just said, leaving it at that and reaching up to get another Italian bread loaf.

She walked over to the frantic hag and tried to smooth everything over. Apparently, the lady wanted to share it with her daughter, but since it was cut slightly “wrong,” oh God, all hell broke loose. (Sarcasm!) So now she had to order a completely separate sandwich for her daughter, who looked as uninterested as anything at the moment.

The three of us were all kind of laughing, and our cashier at the moment had a smirk on his face when he rang her up. Of course, she had to respond with, “I don’t understand why you’re smiling. I’m about to just walk out.”

Quiet enough so that only me and my coworker heard, my manager said, “Good, stay away.”

But a few weeks before that incident, there was one girl who was all smiles who had to still be in high school. She was friendly all throughout the sandwich-making process, and she could tell I was new to the restaurant. When I rang her up, she handed me a gift card instead of a debit card and smiled, saying, “You did a good job!” I blushed and told her to have a wonderful day. She ate in the store, a book by her side.

A few days before the ham sandwich incident, an elderly woman came in to get a chopped salad. I had no idea how to ring up a chopped salad, though, and as I made her salad, she seemed so happy and friendly that I didn’t worry about it just yet. With a bubbly attitude, she named the veggies she wanted in her salad and kept saying how good it looked, and after I chopped and mixed it all up, she said it one more time. Because I didn’t know how to ring up a salad, I apologized and told her to hold on a second while I ran back behind the scenes to retrieve my coworker, the gamer guy. She was patient and friendly as we passed that speed bump, and she thanked me as I handed her the final salad.

I don’t know, it’s just nice to know that not everybody who walks into Subhero is out to get me. I know it’s cool to hate everything nowadays but every so often I get a little bit of my faith in humanity restored.