I do sort of like American sandwiches. That entire dislocate your jaw like you're a human anaconda to try and fit it in, and then you give up, and start to anatomize it, pulling out its innards and building an entire different meal. Americans just look at you. You can't fit that in your mouth? There's a joke in there, one you shouldn't make if you're sitting opposite your girlfriend's parents for the first time. Apparently.
It is rather curious to be presented with a sandwich you can only just fit in your mouth, do battle with it, valiantly defeat it, only to realise your revelling in the Man Vs Meat Sandwich Defeat doesn't count for anything because you only ate the medium and there's a size bigger. Sometimes there are two sizes bigger. Seriously, you'd need two normal sized people just to eat a single sandwich in some of these places.
I remember a bagel shop in Manhatten I visited with three other people. We ordered our bagels, I saw the guy with the meat slicer doing his funky stuff with what looked like most of a pig, and he cut up a stack of ham. I figured that made sense, since there were four of us and we'd all ordered bagels with ham in them. Then he put the entire stack of ham in one bagel and started slicing some more. The bagel was then passed to someone else who repeated the process with cheese (proper sliced cheese, not the semi-liquid gloop that may have been within 50 feet of a cow but only by accident).
I suppose if you want to maintain an existence in which you weigh more than your SUV you need to take some serious calories on board and regularly, but aside from the Small Cheeseburger at Hardees it is remarkable just how many options exist out there that don't include a starter that those on the eastern side of the ocean wouldn't regard as a main course fit for two.
You have reminded me that getting them to hold the mayonnaise is near impossible. The have someone in the back with the gloop cannon. Because they don't put butter on sandwiches, they feel an obligation to hose it down with processed egg food product and then complement it with slices of processed cheese food product. The result congeals into some novel kind of matter. I like the cheese food, but not the processed egg food. The worse thing about the faux-mayo is that it's sweet and I swear it gets sweeter the further south you go. Eventually, somewhere on the Georgia border they find they can't make mayo any sweeter, so they just start slapping bbq sauce on everything. That's just melted sugar and some chemical byproduct of the linoleum manufacturing process. By the time you get to Alabama they've started to fry the entire concoction and sprinkle it with sugar before they serve. They'll probably opt to roll it in maple syrup-style product to ensure the sugar sticks.
Generally I've never had problems getting people to hold stuff, even if they do think I'm weird for it. The not-very-assistive-assistant at Hardees managed to cope with my order for a cheeseburger without ketchup or mustard or mayonnaise, although she looked as if she couldn't comprehend why anyone would want a burger you could actually taste because it wasn't covered with goop.
Most things get sweeter the further south you go. Iced tea is no exception. I order unsweetened tea here in Pennsylvania (most of the way north towards Canada) and aside from a few waitresses who ask if I want sweeteners with it (hint: if I wanted it sweet I'd have ordered the sweet tea), whereas once you get as far south as, say, the Carolinas it's debatable whether unsweetened tea is something you can mention in polite company at all. I wouldn't be surprised if the folks in Alabama shoot anyone who wants unsweet tea.
It's one of those American weirdnesses that you can order a salad and ask for it without lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and with the dressing on the side, and it'll come just like that. Ask for a sandwich without congealed sludge and they're calling Homeland Security.
Ah yes, the dressing on the side option. Highly advisable if you ordered the ranch dressing and don't want your green salad to contain 5,000 calories. I swear this is the only country where eating a salad can give you enough calories to see you through a hilly 300. It's still not as bad as the caramel dip you can buy in little tubs. The ingredients are essentially sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and you really don't want to read any further. It's hugely sweet, among the sweetest things I've ever tasted, and it makes ranch dressing look like a low calorie option.
ETA: On another note, the Guest Support Assistant from Arby's called today. It turned out to be the general manager of the branch that so royally screwed up my order, desperately apologetic that his staff had got my order wrong and ruined my afternoon (his words, mine were much less dramatic and much more sarcastic). He's going to send me some Arby's vouchers and said if I'm passing through again ask for him and he'll fix me up with two free combo meals. So complaining, although somewhat therapeutic, wasn't a wasted effort. The nearest Arby's is about 15 miles from here, but conveniently just opposite where one of my wholesale customers is based.
