On February 16 at exactly 8:00am, I received an assignment from the Flipside staff to investigate the cause of the long lines at Ike’s Place in the Huang Engineering Center. Two grueling weeks later, I emerged from the trenches, ready to share my findings with the world…
There is dirty sauce everywhere.
I’ve been to Iraq, I’ve been to Afghanistan, I’ve even done a stint in ‘Nam, but nothing compared to what I saw during my time in the back of Ike’s. I went in a journalist, and I came out a shell of the man I once was.
There are certain unspeakable things I saw in those two weeks, things I cannot in good conscience reveal to you, my dear reader.
I probably couldn’t put them to words even if I tried. The English language has not yet created words for these things.
You wanna know why the sandwiches take so long?
Do you really want to know? There are hundreds of men, if you can even call them that, who make Ike’s special sauce by stomping tirelessly for hours on end.
These men work in 36-hour shifts and are given no time for sleep or bathroom breaks. They told me they were the reason the sauce is called “dirty.”
Do you want to know how they warm the sandwiches? They have five men who breathe heavily over the bread. These men may run out of breath and die at any time. I’ve seen it myself. I saw a man die while heating a “Vegan Womanizer,” and I will never be the same.
You buy your lunch, but little do you know you are buying a conflict sandwich. Even worse, you pay with your tainted blood money. There’s a reason they don’t take Cardinal Dollars.
Ike’s is the epicenter of the lunchtime-military-industrial complex, and we are all just cogs in the sandwich war-machine. The sandwiches take so long because men are dying back there, just to get you your meal and a caramel apple pop. You are complicit.
