I ordered a breakfast panini in a cafe across town. There was just one woman serving and a constant stream of customers. She said she'd bring the panini to me and gave me one of those numbered blocks to help her remember whose panini was whose.
I sat and read my paper.
Time passed. Enough time for the panini to be ready. More customers were coming in. Should I just go up and get my panini myself? Or would that actually be more hassling than helpful?
More time passed. Still my panini was not coming to me. I wondered it it was burning on the grill. I thought if much more time passed I would go up and get it myself, but still worried about this looking like I was impatient and making a point. She was doing her best.
More time passed and I realised that if I didn't go up now then my panini would either be cold or much much too hot and black.
I got to the counter and saw that there was a panini on a plate. "Is that mine?" I asked and the slightly frazzled woman said that it was and apologised. I gave her back her table number block and took my sandwich.
I had been (relatively) good and ordered a low fat chickeny panini, though I had almost got a nice bacon one and I tucked into the first half hungrily. It was gone before it had time to touch the sides. I then bit into the second half of the toasted sandwich (let's call it what it is) and something seemed queer. I couldn't quite put my finger on it immediately. Then I understood. The second half of my sandwich was half of a different sandwich - a bacon sandwich. Now there were only really two options: most likely I had ordered a psychic panini that was able to determine what filling you actually wanted to be eating and then chameleon like magically changed itself into the desired food, whatever you had ordered or more unlikely, the barista had somehow managed to mix up two customers sandwiches and give them half of each others as well as half of their own. But that would surely take some doing, wouldn't it? Logic would dictate that the two parts of each sandwich would be placed next to each other and be easily identifiable. So I could only conclude that the former solution was correct and Caffe Nero had invented some kind of sentient, telepathic and morphing breaded snack. And hats off to them for that. Caffe Ritazza might lure you in with pictures of comely wenches, but only Caffe Nero is investing its millions in freaky, future food technologies.
Now should I go up to the harassed employee and point out the mistake that had occurred or should I just get on and eat this 50/50 sarnie, the second half of which I had secretly coveted. Or should I eat half of the second half, before pretending to suddenly realise what had happened and go up and demand a whole, new, complete panini. Maybe the old, greedy Richard Herring would have done that, but this was already a calorific breakfast and I didn't want to make a difficult day more difficult for this woman. We all make mistakes, even if this was a fairly basic ones, which could have had more extreme ramifications if I was a Jew or a Muslim. It crossed my mind to pretend I was and try and take the cafe to court and sue them for emotional damages, but I thought a really, really sharp lawyer might be able to prove that I wasn't even religious, let alone opposed to eating pig flesh.
So for all these reasons I just ate the sandwich, yet feeling slightly odd, because it was someone else's sandwich and even though it hadn't actually been put in front of anyone else, I still felt a slight stigma and dirtiness about eating a sandwich that belonged to someone else. It made me feel slightly nauseous.
Interestingly, presumably the person who had ordered the bacon panini didn't complain either. Perhaps they had taken the sandwich away and couldn't be bothered to come back, or maybe they got some pleasure from having a sort of two for the price of one deal. Or maybe they didn't actually notice the difference. Had I been paying slightly less attention I might easily have munched through the second half of my breakfast without really spotting anything odd. I don't know if that says something about the blandness of cafe bought sandwiches or the unthinking way that we (or I) munch our way through our meals without stopping to savour them. It's probably a bit of both.
Weirdly just as I finished my sandwich I experienced my
second power cut in a month. Again I think I probably caused this with some kind of psychic overload brought on by sandwich misappropriation. I am beginning to think that I am probably a new breed of super-evolved human, like in Heroes, with the ability to see a few seconds into the future, make electric items malfunction slightly and forget important details and people who I really should remember. I will almost make it into series 3 of the show and the sweet part is that they won't need to use any special effects. I can do it all myself.
