My future – as a Sandwich Artist

I’m of a certain age. Post-retirement, that is – though when you’re a writer, you never actually retire; you just keep doing it till you drop. I also work as a manuscript editor and literary mentor (see The Deadline Desk page elsewhere on this site. ) As a result, I have a presence on social media and, harking back to my days as a freelance teacher and journalist, my various talents are listed on LinkedIn. When I was newly retired, I found it difficult to stop checking out job ads. Old habits die hard. It wasn’t all about a reluctance to relinquish my place as a useful member of the rat race. There was a vicarious satisfaction in looking at positions for which I would never have to submit my CV and jobs I’d never have to interview for.

What joy to never again have to engage in that false braggadocio of the performative interview! (They say be yourself at an interview; but when I played myself, I invariably didn’t get the job.) As a retiree, scouring the job ads had the same heart-in-mouth sensation of waking up from the classic nightmare and discovering that, no, you’re not sitting your Leaving Cert maths exam again. . . naked. Followed by a delicious sigh of relief.

But since I’ve stopped being a traditional job-hunter, I’ve noticed that the volume of work I’m considered suitable for on my LinkedIn feed has expanded exponentially. Jobs that someone (are there real people doing this anymore?) or some faceless algorithm is pumping my way.

Because I self-describe as a journalist and writer, most of the opportunities I’m offered are in those fields, or in academia where I spent the last 20 years of my career. Time was – particularly post-Crash – when as an out-of-work freelancer I would have welcomed this wealth of opportunities. Lately, though, the algorithms have gone rogue, because now my recommendations include a plethora of retail jobs in hamburger joints and fast food places. As a youngster, I worked in retail but that’s over 40 years ago. I wasn’t very good at it then and I doubt if my skills have improved in the meantime.

Supermarkets are often keen to employ more mature people, particularly on their tills. And perhaps the algorithms have been noting my age and thinking I might like a dinky little part-time job at a cash register in my golden years. Either way, it seems, some kind of weird profiling is going on.

I was pleased to see in the last week that some of the jobs were inching back towards my area of expertise – a prime example was an opening for a storyteller at the National Leprechaun Museum. . . mmn, close. I could see the logic of suggesting online tutoring work, but a part-time teacher of Hindi? But by far the strangest career move suggestion was to become a Sandwich Artist at Subway.

I kid you not. I suppose the word artist might appear somewhere in my CV or list of publications, but where the hell did the sandwich angle come in? Sure, I eat them, but that’s about the height of my expertise. I was nearly tempted to apply just out of sheer curiosity.

What does a Sandwich Artist at Subway do? And what unique offering could I bring to the position? Dash off a few oil paintings of breakfast rolls? Craft installations using bread and assorted fillings? Do live performances with ham? Write a novel from the point of a view of a sliced pan?

The Sandwich Artist role immediately prompted images from my childhood of sandwich board men (they were almost always men). They walked the streets strapped into a matching pair of advertising boards, front and back. Sandwich boards gained popularity in the 19th century, but they’ve been supplanted by large-scale advertising which is aimed at car-drivers rather than pedestrians, and electronic billboards which appeal to our more sophisticated visual senses. The sandwich board, on the other hand, is predominantly text and information-based. You still see sandwich boards outside establishments in the city centre, but generally not with a human attached.

Incidentally, the term “sandwich men” for the mobile human advertiser was, apparently, first coined by author Charles Dickens. He described them as “a piece of human flesh between two slices of paste board”. Now, with branding, we’ve all become walking advertisements. And the sandwich artists are the ones inside “creating” rolls for Subway.