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There's a fairly popular sandwich eatery near my office that I occasionally patronize.  It's the type of place where you go up and order your sandwich at a counter, wait for them to make it, and then go sit down with it.

Normally there are three people behind the counter: One person who speaks english, and two people who don't.  The one who speaks english takes orders and then translates them to the other two, who make the sandwiches.

The other day I went in to get a sandwich, only to find that the guy who usually takes the orders wasn't there.  Instead, the two guys who make the sandwiches were taking orders as well.

They were making sandwiches by trial and error.

This was the procedure:

  • A customer would walk up and order a sandwich.
  • The guy taking orders would nod.
  • The guy taking orders would turn around and proceed to make any arbitrary sandwich.
  • The guy taking orders would hand it to the customer and smile at the next person in line.
After a few minutes, the customer would realize that he/she received an incorrect sandwich.  The customer would walk back up to the counter and say: "This isn't what I ordered, I wanted..." etc.  Usually there were multiple people complaining about the integrity of their sandwich at the same time.  In that case, the guy behind the counter would just take a plate from one customer, take a plate from another customer, switch them, and hand them back with a smile.  This would go on until people somehow got what they ordered or gave up and ate what they were handed.

The most entertaining part was watching people try to use body language to describe their orders.  That seems really hard to do, unless you order a turkey sandwich, and then you just look dumb.