Walking back from coffee this morning, I was passing by a Subway sandwich shop which had a ‘Staff Wanted’ ad in the window. The precise words were:

Wanted: Store Managers, Deputy Managers, Trainee Managers and Sandwich Artists

Let’s just ignore the fact that there appears to be three layers of management in a store here - something that suggests a store is less ‘workplace’ and more like ‘a particularly deviant form of hell’. I’ll deal with that another time.

Let’s look at those last two words: Sandwich Artists

What the hell does that mean?

As one of the guys I regularly work with (Andy Threlfall) put it “you could have a lot of fun with that at an employment tribunal”.

I can imagine the scene now, as the tribunal comes to order and Subway put their case that you punched out a customer after squirting ketchup all over the store. Your defence? Your artistic integrity was being compromised, the customer was just a cheap hack who could not comprehend the depth of your work and the ketchup-squirting was “a statement of surrealism in a neocultural structural discourse” - after all, they did hire you as an artist, right?

Do Subway really consider their lower rungs of staff ‘Sandwich Artists’? Who would put such a phrase on their CV or introduce themselves as that at a party? “Have you met my new boyfriend? He’s a sandwich artist”. Good. Grief.

I am so glad I don’t work for those people.