From: Craig Anderson
Subject: Nacho Problem. (But, ironically, it is.)
To: customer service @ subway.com
Date: Tuesday, 21 June, 2011
Dear Subway.
Hello! You may remember me – I was the one who complained about my Meatball Marinara sub when I found that it contained the worlds most solid meatball. Come to think of it you may NOT remember me, as you failed to address my complaint, or even to reply to my email acknowledging you’d received it. When I initially emailed you I did get a computer generated autoresponder from you saying that my email would be dealt with, but unless “dealing with it” means “ignoring” I think you may have neglected to follow it up.
Ironically, in trying to find your email address to complain again I went to Google and searched for Subway Complaint, only to find that I’m second place on the results out of 5.9 million other webpages worldwide. If you need a recap of my previous complaint, with a view to dealing with it, why not Google me? I seem to be quite easy to find. Just saying…
But, for now, lets let bygones be bygones. That was months ago and I’ve had many a great sub since.
However, (and it pains me to say this,) yet again you have excelled in supplying another brilliantly inedible product. After the carbonised meatball, or Meatrock as it became known, I doubted anything could exist that would be quite as inedible. But I was so wrong. For the first time in ages, I bought something from my local Subway that ended up being genuinely horrific.
I bought this:
You may recognise it as “Subway Nachos.”
Call me naive, but I didn’t know until recently that Subway Nachos are just a packet of Doritos poured into a container. This surprised me. For £1.49 I expected slightly more than a 40p packet of crisps tipped into a box. Admittedly they do get a bit of grated cheese on top and they do get microwaved for a short while before jalapenos are added, but that is pretty much all they are.
On this occasion, it’s the “microwaved for a short while” thing that caused the issue.
Usually when I buy Doritos-in-a-box….. sorry, I mean to say “Subway Nachos”, they empty a packet of crisps into a box, add the cheese atop and then microwave everything for around 40 seconds to ensure the cheese melts.
On this occasion they microwaved the box of cheese-topped Nachos for two and a half minutes. When I saw her key the time into the microwave oven I assumed it was a new, better way of melting the cheese; 2 minutes and 30 seconds on “Low Power” is probably the equivalent melting as 40 seconds on “High Power” provides, but in a less intense way. I assumed this was what she was doing.
However when she reached into the microwave to remove the box two and half minutes later, you could tell that even taking hold of the outer cardboard burnt her own hand. She obviously hadn’t microwaved at “Low Power” but at some nuclear power likened to that given off by the sun. She hastily dropped the volcanic fizzing box onto the counter, added jalapenos, and slid it along to the cashier.
The cashier picked up the box and inserted it into a Subway bag for me before charging me £1.49 for the repackaged crisps. The heat given off by the Nachos caused the bag to shrivel, effectively shrink-wrapping my box.
Bear in mind that up to this point I wasn’t aware of how bad things had got as I hadn’t handled the box myself yet.
I paid, picked up the bag by the handle and left to drive back to work to eat.
Back at work I opened the box and went to pick up a single Nacho, but found I couldn’t. It appeared I had bought one big, smoldering, cheesy Nacho lump. Two and a half minutes in a microwave had affected the cheese topping in a devastating way and everything had melted together to make one ubernacho. Seriously, how hot do your Subway microwave ovens get?!? Just HOW hot does it have to be to melt crisps?
I snapped a section of ubernacho off. It was like trying to eat welded barbed wire.
I sat there, holding a hot steaming lump of mess. Then it occurred to me. In old horror films where they bring the dead back to life, they usually harnessed the power of lightening. I considered how likely it was that, after being exposed to nuclear amounts of microwaves, my Nachos could now actually be a living, breathing entity. I slowly angled the cheesy lump upwards, and carefully positioned it onto the Subway Nacho box.
It stood there. On TWO legs!
Oh. My. God.
In her accidental attempt to provide me with toasty hot Nachos the Subway lady, through means usually associate with mad professors on old sci-fi films, had accidentally created a living, steaming, pulsating entity.
And whats more, it looked like a Pokemon.
I wonder how hard is it to train your staff to type numbers into a microwave so they don’t inadvertantly create the hottest substances known to man or accidentally create other lifeforms?
Don’t get me wrong, honestly I AM impressed that a member of staff was able to conjure life simply by combining a packet of crisps and some dairy product and either using some mad scientist logic or some form of witchcraft. I guess I’m just typically British and unhappy that it wasn’t what I asked for. I asked for Nachos, not for a new pet.
They weren’t just burnt, they were WAAAAAAY beyond burnt. If you were to buy a dictionary and look up the word “charred”, there’d be a picture of my Nachos in there. (And no, that isn’t a euphemism.)
It can’t be too much for me to ask that every time I go to Subway and buy food, the food I receive is edible, can it? I don’t visit Subway to fill in a betting slip like you do at Argos, in the hope that the product I receive won’t be rubbish. Having a 95% chance that the food I buy from you will be edible shouldn’t be enough for somewhere that sells food. You should sell edible food 100% of the time.
I would like a reply to this email, from a real human, within 14 days. Remember Woolworths? I’m not saying I had anything to do with its downfall directly, but I did once complain in writing after buying some childrens armbands from there that had a slow puncture. 2 weeks later, and after I hadn’t received a reply, they went bankrupt. Of course, that was a complete coincidence…
Hopefully we can resolve this in a calm manner.
Craig Anderson
About the Author
I vised subway today with my frend in stirling and a member of staff called tracy was very chekly and told my frend that her custm is not wellcome at subway
this is not the fust time i used the subway in stirling that i got chekly staff
Dear Sir or Mdm
driving from ramsgate to Folkestone to day we stopped at the sub way restaurant or call it what you will . We went in and I ordered to bacon rolls. I was offered do you want this do you want that no thank you very much. I just want two bacon rolls the roles were prepared and I asked if the bacon was freshly cooked. No we will mean that so with that she picked out from x-ray several pieces of what appeared to be streaky bacon, then I’m asked for two teas. I was then asked to pay just over seven pound and took the tray to the table. All I can say it was the most disgusting meal I’ve ever had no flavour at all but it tasted of something neither bread nor bacon. Needless to say, I shan’t be going to sub way any more. Much better to support the independent caravans in lay by yours. D Packer