musings on the sandwich nature

http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/268061.html

So, I'm working in a deli. A question I ask my customers fairly frequently is "How would you like your cut?"

At least one in five will answer "for sandwiches."
Another one in 20 or so will answer "sliced"

Well... yes. I generally assume that you don't want me to take a knife and hack off perfect carrot shaped chunks of salami (and even if y0u did, I don't get paid nearly enough to do that.) Of course you want me to use my slicer and slice the meat.
But here's the thing about the first answer. At the basic level, a sandwich is a construct with a piece of bread, something in the middle, and another piece of bread. There are other possible formulations, of the sandwich, but they are all variants on that initial theme. (I was initially going to steal the Gaiman Cities essay that is the thing of his that I ever read, years before I knew who he was, but that would have been more work, and well, lots of work little likely response yields meh.) Any damned way I cut the meat could be used for sandwiches. Hum. I should see about getting that essay printed on something I can hang on my wall... The form and thickness of the middle material is immaterial to the sandwichhood of the sandwich, so please, for the love of your kneecaps, give me something that gives me some indication of how thick you want things cut. (Of course, that is easier said than done, since some people say "thin" and mean "4mm" and some say "thin" and mean "transparent" and the complete inability for people to use their fingers to express a distance, well, if I used the thicknesses people showed me with their finger tips, I'd be selling a lot more quarter inch slabs of ham. (I've only once had a customer put her fingers a quarter inch apart and actually want a quarter inch piece of whatever I was cutting.)

Also, you are buying 9.5 dollar a pound meat. Please buy the one you want. Saving fifty cents a pound to get the one on sale when you are buying a half pound? That is the epitome of silly, as is buying twice as much as you would regularly buy because of said fifty cent rebate. (Seriously, if you buy twice as much as usual, either you will end up throwing a bunch a way so it just cost you a lot of money to save fifty cents, it will take you a long time to eat your food, which is completely contrary to the purpose of getting meat cut fresh for you from a deli, or you will freeze half of it, which is incredibly wrong. The 3 bucks a pound ham or whatever in the lunch meat section on the other side of the store? It tasted better than my meat will taste after being frozen and thawed, so now you are spending 9 bucks to save fifty cents on something that tastes worse than the three dollar alternative, thus costing you 6 dollars for a fifty cent sale.

Mayhap this is a sign that I am in essence done with this job...