There’s a lot of whiny teenagers complaining about “the system”. It’s a sentiment rooted in a time before time itself—or a few decades ago, whichever came later. You see, somewhere along the line, the teenager became too cozy with modern living. Living at absolute peak of human comfort—a pleasure once reserved for the few, now democratized for the plenty—there still breathed within him a nagging discontent. And so, almost on a whim, he declares, “this sucks”, and begins the hunt for a minimum wage job.

My friends, I was that teenager. I had everything I ever wanted, and I had it all for free. That’s the whole reason parents go to work, right? So that we don’t have to. Alas, we all make mistakes and mine is one that I have rued for many months: I applied at a sandwich shop.

My name is Alex Hanson. I work at Subway. My job sucks.

Let us experience together a day in the life of a Sandwich Artist. Your first thought, naturally, is how cool it is to be called an artist. You think to yourself how novel it is to take a mundane task like making sandwiches and turn it into an artistic craft. You picture yourself striving to make the perfect sandwich, fully knowing the goal is unreachable, yet fully believing that the pursuit will make you stronger.

Open your eyes, man! We are artists in the same way that Fergie is a musician. We’re fed a serialized list of instructions and like a Turing machine, process them bit-by-bit, hoping the customer finds the result pleasing. If we are artists, then we have “sold out” long before we don the plastic gloves, for as each sandwich fills the bellies of the huddled masses, a part of ourselves becomes a bit more empty.

Philosophy aside, it’s time to go to work. As always, I’ll be opening the store this weekend. I hope you didn’t have too much fun this Friday, because we’ll need to be there at 6:30. That’s ridiculous, right? Even the Sun sleeps in later than that in the colder seasons.

Hold on, let’s come back down to Earth for a second. There’s a lot to do today. I’ll be baking at least 240 pieces of bread, measuring out about one-dozen meats, and chopping enough onions to flush all of Neptune’s oceans from my sinuses. That’s not all, of course, but the details might interfere with one’s absorption of the overall picture: this opening thing really sucks!

Let’s take a bit of time to focus on bread making, because I’m pretty sure the number of teenagers baking bread by the hundreds is small and elitist. In the interest in full disclosure, the bread comes in frozen sticks. Since the act of baking is enough to drive a sane man out of his mind, forcing me to mix dough on site would pretty much be an act of murder. But make no mistake: bread is the cruelest mistress a man could ever know.

Time never passes you by at Subway, because every twenty minutes there’s a timer going off telling you that more bread should be made, or that bread must be taken out of the oven, or that Bread just released a greatest hits album. And of course there are no less than five timers in the store, so trying to pinpoint which one is always an exercise in stereophonic echolocation. Before you know it, the day is done and you forgot to take a lunch break. Normally you would appreciate the bitter irony, but there’s no room for laughter in a business moving at the speed of the American appetite.

Still, it never gets old. Words can’t describe the rush I feel every time I get jalapeño juice, chemical sanitizer, or marinara sauce in my eyes and/or clothing. No page of prancing poetry can capture the majesty of shuffling down a crowded corridor holding pans of hot bread like pie in the sky, trying not to drop them on the heads of coworkers, even as the penetrating heat burns my skin. And of course, no science can explain why a person would wait 30 minutes in a hot deli for a sandwich for which they have all the components at home.

It’s been 13 months since I made that journey into the work force. I’ve seen the wonders of capitalism full circle. I’ve been taxed and had taxes refunded. I’ve tipped generously for mediocre service, and received less money in tips than I find on the ground while walking home. I’ve been shell-shocked by outrageous prices at foreign cash registers, and retaliated back when the ill-informed customer insists that “the ad said all footlongs were five dollars”. I’ve seen it all my friends. And after seeing it all, I can only say one thing:

“This sucks.”