I hate Subway

Subway is a nasty, horrible place where you are barked at by low paid youths in a strange language seemingly of their own devising. Years ago a work colleague encouraged me to go along, echoing one of their big selling points, which is that the sandwiches are all freshly made. What he didn't say was that they were freshly made using really shit ingredients. It doesn't help me one little bit that the piece of processed plastic cheese that sits in the middle of the bread that can probably withstand nuclear attack was only just put there. It still tastes of nothing and adheres itself to the roof of my mouth.

So, it's good to know that now I have a slightly more educated* reason for this instinctive hatred, courtesy of Mark Steel. Karl Marx argued that in an industrialised society workers become alienated from the things that they make. This is because "the garment or pot that they are making ceases to be a garment or a pot and becomes a commodity they must labour on for a wage" - that's a quote from Mark Steel, not Marx by the way.

With the advent of the production line method of working workers became even more alienated, as not only were they not connected to the benefits of what they produced but they were also often disconnected from the end product itself.

Steel argues that when applied to Subway we, the customers, have become a part of that process that the poor sods behind the counter are alienated from. So we stand there in a queue for rubbish food, fuming at being treated like an object while the staff have been conditioned into seeing us as part of a production line. Everyone's a loser!!

Oh, and if you want this with added jokes on top then you'll have to read Mark's latest book.

*where "educated" = "intellectually pretentious", perhaps