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The world's dullest man

I like to think that I'm an interesting guy. I wear sombreros indoors, I can play Guitar Hero on Expert, and I hold wacky political opinions. But recently I did something that convinced me that I am in fact the dullest man in the world.

If you work at Facebook, you may know me for my sandwich-making. Occasionally dissatisfied with the catered entree of the day, I will go and make a sandwich. Having done this many times, I have developed a rough technique that I tend to use - roast beef, cheese, onions, eggs, and mayo and dijon mustard. Each of these ingredients is arranged carefully so as to impart their flavor evenly throughout the sandwich - for example, I try to arrange the sliced rings of red onion according to a randomized Jackson Pollock-esque distribution, and I am careful in my distribution of the eggs and condiments so that no portion of the sandwich has too much of one type of flavoring - it all has to be evenly spread out - "well-hashed," in computer science terms.

Argh!Argh!The exception, which I have long been unable to overcome, has been the cheese. Those of you who share the sandwich bar know that the cheese comes in square slices, whilst my favored bread (Oat Nut) is a slightly elongated rectangle. The problem here is that there is no way to "tile" or arrange cheese onto the rectangle of bread and achieve an even distribution of cheesiness. Either the cheese sits on one side of the bread, leaving an empty segment of the bread without cheese, or I place it in the center, leaving the two edges without cheese. Double argh!Double argh!If I place it on the side, and then add a second cheese aligned to the opposide side of the bread rectangle, the center of the bread has a dual layer of cheese - far too much cheesiness, as cheese is a major source of glutamate, a chemical responsible for the flavoring we call "savory" - too much glutamate can render a dish too sharp, overpowering the other flavors.

Hooray!Hooray!Finally one day, a few weeks ago, I had an insight! By placing the cheese angled at around 30 degrees from the bread, I could place two pieces of cheese, each one slightly closer to the two ends of the bread rectangle, and greatly minimize the amount of overlap in the middle to an negligible amount. The missing overlap area, of course, was taken up by the corners of the cheese hanging out from the edges of the sandwich, which gave a pleasing "tips of cheese sticking out of the sandwich" aesthetic.

Standing at the sandwich station having just realized this innovative new geometric configuration, I exclaimed mentally to myself, "I know! I'll put the cheese on my sandwich diagonally!" At the very moment I uttered that to myself, I suddenly realized that I had become that guy, the boring, staid fuddy-duddy who eats a sandwich every day and thinks it's a big adventure because that day, he's putting his cheese on his sandwich diagonally, as though afterwards I would congratulate myself with something like, "You're a daring man, Wong! Today's a red-letter day!" and then go back to my desk and finish out this amazing day by approving a record number of invoices later that afternoon.

So in conclusion, I am the world's dullest man.