The Idler

You’ll Never Eat a Pre-Packaged Sandwich Again

I worked in a sandwich factory for a miserable pittance in the summer after my GCSEs. The permanent staff we’re bitter and resentful towards me (after all, I was a 16 year old getting a bit of extra pocket money so that I could afford to go on holiday without my parents for the first time, while they had 47 children, depressed husbands and a Special Brew habit to feed), and manifested this by making me do all the crap elements of sandwich-making - yes, there is a hierarchy of pleasurable and not so pleasurable elements to making sandwiches, usually dictated by the different fillings we had to use.

I was always ‘in charge’ of the eggs, which, when stored, pre-boiled, in vats of fluorescent yellow vile-smelling liquid, are never nice to prepare i.e. rinse and shove through a giant mincing machine and then dowsed in several industrial-sized jars of cheap mayonnaise. This is especially unpleasant when it is stiflingly hot, and suffering with the full-effect of a never-before-experienced hangover. As an example of what is a ‘pleasant’ job in the sandwich factory, operating the buttering machine was much-coveted, being both easy (you simply tip the sliced loaf into a chute, and it pops out at the other end, ready buttered, or in the case of this factory, ready cheap-margarined, and you just stack) and fun (you could really challenge yourself by attempting to break any personal record you might have achieved in the buttered loaves/minute league, or you could go quite slowly and become transfixed by the gentle rhythm of the buttered slices popping out of the buttering machine). But these ‘pleasurable’ jobs were scant and heavily out-weighed by more mundane activities like scraping off great swathes of grated cheese (cheap, warm and rubbery of no fixed origin) from the preparation tables or mixing huge trays of stinky tuna mayonnaise.

There are two women who will forever be lodged in my memory from the sandwich factory; Betty Gums and Betty Lettuce. Obviously, with two Bettys, there needed to be clarification as to who you wanted to speak to. Betty Gums was called Betty Gums because all her teeth were false and she had peculiarly pale gums. She was a sweet, timid woman. And Betty Lettuce was called Betty Lettuce because it was always her job to wash the lettuce. I don’t know whether she chose to do this, or was forced into it at an early age. She was a fiery woman, old before her time, whose daughter once tried to kill her. The other employees who stand out were a gay man who denied being gay and said his live-in lover was a flat mate and he was celibate, a matricidal woman (see above), and a power-crazed chef who would stomp around on the floor above us, sporadically sending down pieces of cooked meat on the dumb waiter.
Happy days.

Jessie Sanders
jessie@zone.ltd.uk