I had another morning where I sat at my desk and was bombarded with statements from colleagues, including:

‘They should give the inventor of coffee a statue, an Oscar or the Nobel Prize, don’t you think?’ My eyes wandered off to the other desks, and then I noticed. Trophies lay on all the desks; pens, paper and on the corner of the desks the price of honor; sandwiches in transparent plastic sandwich bags. Sometimes there was a consolation prize next to a sandwich bag: an apple or a banana. Of the people with those bags, I knew they had someone at home who cared about them, to give them that.

I had not seen sandwich bags since primary school. During secondary school we ate sandwiches that were packed in a brown bag by our parents. Plain ciabattas were my lunch because I could not eat a regular sandwich. I once suffered a trauma because I saw a boy eat his sandwich after it got wet because of a leaky milk cup. Since then I have only touched toasted bread or ciabattas.

I concluded that when someone chose to take their own lunch to work, the people with sandwich bags made their lives very easy. The sandwich bag wasn’t for no reason the ‘smart casual’ variant of the lunchbox. Sandwiches in a lunchbox required a real investment in advance. First, a box had to be chosen in the store. It would still be difficult to find the adult version of a Winnie the Pooh lunchbox. With such an assignment, someone was really busy for an hour before something suitable was found. In addition, it could also prove impossible to find a matching cup.

If I was being honest, I admitted to be very jealous of colleagues with sandwich bags. They had a very strong discipline. In the morning they got up fifteen minutes earlier, and the night before they had the thought that they had to leave fifteen minutes earlier. Then came the most important decision: was it ham, cheese or jam? Everything had to be made, neatly folded, a plastic bag had to be found, then a knot had to be made around the bag, and people had to be careful to not let the sandwiches be crushed by a laptop. So a lot of work would have to be done to ensure that the sandwich was at its best. That is why I sincerely asked myself; Why did not people just buy a sandwich?