I don't like Wicklow

Wicklow has never been known as a bastion of intellectual thought. I attended the local boys' secondary school here. I would estimate that less than 20% of the guys from my class are now college graduates. I would also estimate that less than 20% of my teachers were college graduates, but I'm reliably informed that it is a requirement for getting a job as a teacher.

The point of this is that there are occasional moments in Wicklow when something happens to bring home the notion that the town is essentially one large community for the hard of thinking.

Today I went to the local Super Valu to buy some lunch. I approached the deli counter, presented the girl with my best smile (it's a good one reserved solely for people who are about to make me a sandwich) and requested a chicken fillet baguette with wedges. There are some who might not be familiar with the chicken and wedges roll, but it's a reasonably straightforward request and not particularly uncommon or difficult to make. Essentially, it involves cutting up some chicken, placing it in a baguette and adding wedges on top of it.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when the deli counter girl responded to my request with a simple "no". I immediately retracted my best smile and replaced it with my most persuasive smile. I pointed out that all the necessary ingredients were present in abundant numbers and offered to share the recipe with her, if necessary (my cheeky smile was employed for this last comment).

She failed to see the humour of this and impatiently told me that she was not permitted to make a roll with chicken and wedges in it. I couldn't believe this. This means that there is a deli counter in Wicklow that considers the combination of chicken and wedges between two slices of bread to be so problematic that they have made it an officially proscribed sandwich. Perhaps they can't afford to train their staff to produce sandwiches with more than one ingredient.

I switched to my disbelieving smile and made the point that this position was a bit ridiculous. This was met with a tut, a sigh and an announcement that that was the way of things and that if I had a problem with it I was welcome to speak to the manager. In her defence, I suppose it's OK that she treated me like a piece of dirt she had found on the underside of her shoe. After all, I'm only a paying customer who has requested that she put two of the ingredients on offer in a roll. Obviously she doesn't get paid enough to deal with that kind of nonsense.

The manager approached, unbidden. He was a big hulking sort of man who looked like he should be pulling a plough across a field or forging swords on an anvil (actually, this is an unfair statement - obviously I'm just intimidated by a man with the sort of skill required to be the manager of an entire deli counter in a small town in Wicklow who still manages to find the time to come up with such inspired policies as "no wedges with chicken"). He came over and stood uncomfortably close - the way older, bigger guys do in school when they want to intimidate you - and asked me what my problem was. I explained my predicament and he confirmed that it was indeed the case that it was their policy not to make the Sandwich That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I made the point that this appeared, on the surface, not to make an awful lot of sense. He shrugged and looked at me as if to say "do you want to make something of it?" and so I thanked him for his cooperation and went to the Centra on the main street, where I bought a chicken fillet and wedges roll.