Photo by Danielle Scott
At the Panera near my place, they usually have this nice free selection of bread samples on a plastic lunch tray with breads I would never buy but will eat a bite of for free, and they have these tongs that I never use too.
So I was in there on Tuesday and I walked by the special counter where they make your special coffee drinks and milkshakes and frozen lemonade, and there was a plastic tray of bready-type samples on the counter next to the exotic tea jar. Normally the free bready samples are near the front of the store, and normally there are about 30 bready pieces instead of what looked like two raggedy pieces left on the tray; but I am one who adapts to change quickly and without fuss, and so on the way by to fill my cup with fountain-made Dr. Pepper I grabbed one of the two bready hunks and popped it in my mouth. It was about 11:30am.
The thing in my mouth was cinnamon-esque and nutty, a clear breakfast type taste. Good, but a little out of range of the lunchtime palette. Then, as I thoughtfully munched on my free cinnanut bread sample on my way to the carbonated pleasure dispenser, I wondered why a) the sample tray was in the wrong place, b) it was an unusual selection, and c) there were only two crummy samples and what might have been a used napkin under the tray.
“Hmmmm”, I munchedly thought. “I believe I am eating someone’s leftover breakfast pieces. I wish, both that this was not so sticky and hard to quickly chew and swallow in my mouth, and that my fellow customers would not look at me like that. I will keep walking.” It was a tortured 20 seconds of too late to spit the bite out, but not yet time to swallow.
So in a dignified manner, I carefully chewed somebody else’s food and rinsed with my own Dr. Pepper, hoping the pressurized CO2 bubbles would, like the cartoon bubbles on DOW liquid bathroom cleaner commercials, scrub my mouth clean of foreign saliva and DNA like they were soap scum and hard water stains.
On the way back, I noticed the tray had been discreetly removed from the counter by the thoughtful but unhurried staff of “Panera which is Italian for ‘We Cater to Idiots Who Eat Things They Find’ Bread”, and I grabbed a sample of strongly flavored rye-type bread from the properly placed front counter tray on the way to the door.
