How significant is your job to your social status? This unknown protagonist starts out the short story starts out with the fraise:
”In keeping with my station in society, and having been rejected by the bowling alley, I took a low-paid job at a sandwich factory”. (p. 2, l. 1-2)
This first person limited narrator tells us about his new job, which creates his monotonous workdays, until he one day gets persuaded into talking to a woman at work, and he ends up driving her home. One day he faints at work and decides that he is never coming back.
His new job consists in supplying sandwiches with either salad, ham, egg or tomatoes. His new work does not only have an effect on his physical health, but also on his mental. He gets weird fantasies and nightmares about work that drills all the way into his soul: “The acid in the tomatoes would bite into the fingers after a while, making then sting, stinging the soul. All kinds of bitter thoughts filled me then” (p. 3, l. 53-55). Filling up the sandwiches with tomatoes is said to be the worst of the tasks, because of the acid in tomatoes which make your skin itch: “If you were lucky it (red. your daily task) would be lettuce or ham or egg, but if you were unlucky or new, it would be tomatoes” (p. 3, l. 47-48). The work is generally described as trivial, but the individuals work speed is also described as being indifferent towards the working process. It does not matter if one slows down or speeds up his process, they all have to agree on the pace for things to run smooth: “Although overall productivity was largely unaffected by what choice the workers made” (p. 3, l. 74-75). When things do not run smooth at the factory, they all start making mistakes: “The fact we were diverging in our approach now made all sort of problems appear. And these problems manifested as poorly made sandwiches. Sandwiches with no lit (…)” (p. 3, l. 75-77). The narrator is humorous, which makes the short story more exiting to read. He uses humour in his descriptions of the different characters he meets during the story. His colleague Dot is compared with pirates, the workers with the Sisyphus myth and the employers with authoritarian prison officers. The Sisyphus myth is mentioned shortly when speaking of the monotonously work: “(…) all the ingredients of a Greek punishment were in place. A whole factory full of workers who would bite of your arm to push a rock up a hill for eternity” (p. 3, l. 56-58). Here the pushing a rock up the hill is fulfilling the work, because it is never ending, there will always be more work to do when a sandwich is done.
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