I paid $13.50 for a sandwich today. It was a huge mistake. I’ve come here today to make amends for that mistake.

The scene of the crime was the Bay Cities Deli in Santa Monica, and I had stopped there on the way to an appointment at a nearby client’s office. This prospect excited me, as Bay Cities has arguably the best deli sandwich in Los Angeles, and at reasonable prices. Or so I thought.

Scene of the Crime

Once I was able to jockey for a spot in the limited parking lot, I hustled into the shop. Figuring I had just missed the weekday lunch rush, I thought I’d just waltz in and out. But such is not life in sunny Santa Monica; the inside of Bay Cities was like WalMart on Black Friday. Cray-cray. Yes, that’s right. So impossibly impossible that only the most awful slang would suffice in its description. And cray-cray is about as awful as one can get.

Where the magic happens–the magic being the disappearing act of all the cash in your wallet for a simple sandwich.

After fifteen minutes of waiting for service, it became apparent that my “number”–you pull a number to get served–was still twenty customers away from being called. If I didn’t act quickly, I’d either be late to my appointment or on-time and hungry. So I started searching for an out. I found one immediately, behind the deli glass, next to the roast beef. It was a bundle of fresh, turkey-and-other-shit-that-looked-yummy delight just waiting to be snagged.

“Say,” I asked the lady behind the counter, “these sandwiches wouldn’t happen to be available… number-free?”

Holding up my triple-digit teardrop paper, the woman behind the counter nodded, and indicated the man in the black polo twenty paces to her left. “He can help you,” she said. Why she couldn’t simply grab the sandwich and hand it to me was beyond imagination, but at least it wasn’t a rejection.

As the man prepared the sandwich for me in its new wrapping, I saw him scribble a sweet nothing on the paper before handing it over. Most sandwiches at the deli were in the $8 range, including custom options that allowed you to choose your own ingredients. Perhaps this was a reward for customer patience. Nonetheless, I figured my sandwich would be $8. It was practically a consolation sandwich, pre-made this morning for the poor sap who scheduled his day a little too tightly for sitting around until someone yelled “107”.

I was in such a hurry to leave, that when the man handed me the sandwich, I grabbed it and raced to the checkout without further question. It wasn’t until the cashier blurted out the total I owed for the sandwich that I bothered to look at what the man had written on the food’s wrapping:

$13.50

Seriously, there must have been a mix-up.

As humans, we have an innate instinct for survival. When feeling pressured by external influences, one loses the ability to distinguish between practical triggers for adrenal release and those triggers that are wholly outdated. The difference between, say, a fast-approaching sharp-toothed predator and a fast-approaching meeting with a development associate feel eerily similar. Both require physical movement and emotional response. Both require immediate action in order to survive free of punishment. In the case of hunger, that priority action is the capture of edibles, and the consequential movement becomes throwing an obscene amount of cash down on the checkout counter for one freaking sandwich.

$13.50.

I certainly won’t win any Nobel Peace Prize nominations from this work, but from this day in particular I can learn one thing: Don’t ever pay $13.50 for a sandwich because $13.50 is way too much to pay for a sandwich and you’ll spend the rest of the day wondering why you spent $13.50 on a sandwich.

Heed this advice and grow to be a better person.

It was a tasty meal though, I’ll give you that.

– TOH