Saw this today over at Frog Blog:
It reminded me that my grandmother, gone to her reward these 33 years, used to be terribly precise about how she made sandwiches.
A great cartoon over at Left-Handed Toons addressed this issue with regards to how Subway made their sandwiches:
I always thought this was terribly funny, mostly because it was true. What I didn’t know is that people like Drew Mokris, poking merciless fun at Subway for their un-geometric procedures, actually made a difference. At least in Australia and New Zealand.
Found this over at Gawker; the original article from The Consumerist is gone (and their robots.txt file stopped the Wayback Machine from scraping it), but it was picked up by various news feeds, including NPR.
However, not all store managers were down with the change:
This manager is a douchebag.
And the article over at the Inquisitr documents one particular sandwich artist named Chris whose sole purpose in life appeared to be frustrating customers.
I’ve been working at subway for about a year and a half, and it always amuses me when people complain about not tessellating cheese. Now, merely to amuse myself, not only do I not tessellate the cheese, but I also leave gaps in the cheese placement so that an indeterminate amount of your bites will be cheeseless. Also, I put a really small amount of dressing on your sandwich whenever you ask for it. Then when you ask for more, I squirt out a large quantity before you can say stop so that your sandwich has far too much dressing. Then, when I cut the sandwich in half, I only cut it 3/4ths of the way through so that you have to messily tear the rest of the sandwich yourself.
Yes, he’s a douchebag too. If I were running a Subway store, he’d be looking for a job at McDonald’s faster than you can say “bogan.”
I don’t eat at Subway all that often, but I’ve never had a bad experience there. Now I’m tempted to go, just to see how they do it in my vicinity.
The Old Wolf is hungry.
Playing in the World Game 
It is also true that sandwiches that are cut in half diagonally taste better than sandwiches that are cut in half straight across.
A bread and butter sandwich, cut diagonally, with the crusts cut off, taste the best of all. Ask any 5-year-old. On the other hand, experts disagree: http://home.comcast.net/~ccdesan/PeanutsBread&Butter.jpg
the good sandwich guide overlap technique makes this post one of the most life changing reads of my life! Why did I not know that that is how the overlap is avoided!!!!
Any mathematician knew all this long ago–but they didn’t see the need to tell others, since the proof is so elementary.
And I agree about Chris the jerk. He needs to get a new job, preferably one far, far away from serving people. And his manager should be the one to fire him if anybody complains.
After I gave this some more thought, I realized the “don’t tesselate” memo could have been written by the owner, given that Subways are independent franchises. Or by the manager at the behest of the owner. Or, simply just by a manager trying to increase his bottom line. At any rate, *someone* is a jerk…