Origin of the Brown Bag Lunch Kid

James decided that for the month of December he take his lunch break at one of the cafes or restaurants around his office at least three days of the week. It was a short month of work, due to a week break around Christmas time. He worked for an insurance company that specialized in insuring churches, and in order to keep up appearances for their clients the office closed up around the holiday, and gave all the employees a week off. Business in the office the whole month long was preoccupied with a dreamlike disengagement. Few sales were made, most parishes caught up with Christmas preparation. Everyone in the office knew that, come the New Year, a rush of new clients would mean several months' worth of tedious new paperwork to fill out and file. All of this filled December with a strange, detached feeling. James didn't like it, and set out to preoccupy himself with lunch.

For the last several months he had gone to the same place for Vietnamese sandwiches every Monday and Wednesday, and Thursdays, if it was a hard week. Ostensibly, according to his budget, he was only supposed to eat lunch out once a week. But, come 11:30, he would passionately feel that he needed some sort of reward for enduring the hours of sitting still. After the first time he deviated from his budgetary instincts, his plan to save money for traveling was swiftly amended and then suspended until a later date. He loved Vietnamese sandwiches. He couldn't believe that he had lived so long without them. He would definitely make sure to visit Vietnam when he went traveling, he often thought as he slowly consumed his sandwich. Once he saved enough money, he would go straight to Vietnam and see if the country looked as indescribably good as the sandwiches that bared its name tasted. That was to say, once he could manage to stop buying all those sandwiches and put more money in savings, he would visit Vietnam. Often guiltily gorging himself with the fourth or fifth Vietnamese sandwich of the week, James would philosophize grimly over this paradox.

His co-workers teased him about the Vietnamese sandwiches during the height of his addiction. "You're going to burn out on Vietnamese sandwiches," people would warn him all the time. "Try the sushi," obnoxious Rob told him. But James didn't want sushi. Elsie, the ugly girl who worked across from him, became half-seriously concerned about him and would frequently use that concern as an excuse to invite him to lunch with her at the weirdo Bulgarian cafe. In his darker moments, James would find himself subjecting himself to a horrific anti-fantasy where he proposed to Elsie and took out a mortgage on a house. Her concern and her offer of Bulgarian food only served to strengthen James' love of Vietnamese sandwiches. He never wanted to eat anything else. Everything else tasted too dry, too bland. He would go to Vietnam and he would find a master sandwich maker, and he would train with him in the Himalayans, or whatever mythical mountain range went through Vietnam. It was his destiny.

Then it all came crashing down. He burned out in mid-November, and realized with a heart full of sorrow that he could never eat another Vietnamese sandwich. He hated them. A broken man, he went with Elsie to the Bulgarian place. He sat in morose silence while she daintily shoved an enormous mound of goulash down her throat. Repentant, he began to pack poorly-made tuna sandwiches each morning, which he consumed listlessly in the break room. Come December, he  regrouped his inquisitive spirit and his enthusiasm for exploration and set out to find a new and better lunch.

After several weeks he had bravely consumed German food, Tibetan cuisine, something advertised as Inuit stew, and many pounds of Ethiopian mush. He went to the taqueria around the corner from the office and had a burrito, and found that they made it without beans. How could you call it a burrito without beans? That was just a wrap. Frustration began to set in, quickly followed by fatigue. He got dizzy from the Chinese place, probably because of the MSG. He missed health food and began to buy organic at the grocery store. It was only December 9th and he wanted to give up. Rob suggested again that he try the sushi place.

Each day after lunch, James would discuss that day's excursion with Elsie. Gradually this daily update attracted wider attention, and it evolved into a large discussion on lunch possibilities. In this way, obnoxious Rob got involved. "If you just took my advice about the sushi place a month ago," he sleazed obnoxiously at James one day, "you wouldn't have burned out on Vietnamese sandwiches." As if he knew what was good for James. Rob was almost middle-aged, balding and utterly sleazy. The very next day, James went to the sushi place and found enough reasons to dislike the place. The decor was awful, for example. You could taste the mercury in the fish. The rice was too sticky. The wasbai was too green. Rob was scandalized when James reported back.

"You have no taste," he laughed stiffly. "You don't have mature taste for finer cuisine yet."

"So it's because I'm too young?" James asked angrily, trying to smile like it was no big deal. Rob and he exchanged a few more words before lapsing into enraged silence. The whole office lapsed into silence, for several days afterwards. Elsie asked James if everything was "okay at home," and she made a weird face when he laughed. On December 22nd, the day before Christmas break, his boss called James into his office and told him he was not going to be promoted.

James hadn't known  he was in the running for the promotion. His boss sighed and shook his head, while fiddling with the large gold cross that sat on display on his desk. "This lunch nonsense is too much, James. You've let it get in the way of your work and you're productivity has dramatically fallen. And that taqueria is the best in the City. Hands down," he said matter-of-factly.

And that is how James began his famous, near-fanatical adherence to the brown bag lunch.