I miss cohost.
But I do need to update this more frequently. I got so busy and then sick for a week which only made me busier, but I've had a blog post brewing in my head for a while about ascetism, silence, and the hurly-burly noise of the internet (in particular, tier lists???).
Well, time to catch up on work so that I have time to write what I actually want to write about!
So I worked as a tester at Nintendo for several months and it was maybe one of the weirdest experiences in my life.
One of the things about being a tester at Nintendo is that you don't actually work for Nintendo per se. You work for a temp agency that has a contract with Nintendo. And the thing is that (at least when I was there) usually there wasn't a whole lot of stuff to do; from what others told me, most of the actual heavy duty testing is done in Japan and us English testers (at least, me and my team anyway) were there to catch spelling errors and the occasional bug. Other than that, we were warm bodies in seats testing the game so that Nintendo could say x amount of hours were spent testing their stuff.
As such, you didn't actually need, like, any work skills to be a tester. You just had to be able to handle a controller. You didn't even have to be good at video games; if anything, the worse you were at video games the more likely you were going to do something that you weren't supposed to do and accidentally break something (which you could submit as a bug). When I say you didn't need any skills, I don't mean this as a mean "look at these losers" kind of way; everyone has to start somewhere and I do believe that for many people being a tester at Nintendo was a really good way to get a job when you didn't really have any other skills. It was a way to put something on your resume, looked somewhat impressive that might get your foot in the door at other places, get paid slightly higher than minimum wage, and get access to employee discounts at the company store. If you were someone who had not acquired any work skills for whatever reason (because often times it is a matter of social and economic opportunity and not of personal morality) and didn't mind "playing" video games for eight hours a day, it was a pretty sweet gig. I mentioned to my wife at the time that, while to many people the long term temp testers might seem like apathetic slackers to others, they had a very real and simplistic joy in which they approached life. They seemed to be genuinely happy, and I think that is honestly something many, much more "successful" people in life never achieve.
But I digress (something I do a lot).
I certainly do not believe that the fact the job did not come with a very high skill requirement means there is no value in doing that as a job, but it did lead to the occasional story about how someone got hired who didn't seem to have a lot of... I hesitate to say common sense because I studied and deconstructed, in many ways, the concept of common sense in my masters and PhD work; there is nothing actually "common" about common sense. So let's just say that sometimes you run into someone who hasn't been socialized very well and sometimes they would do odd things.
Which brings me to sandwich pants guy.
So I want to make it clear that I never met sandwich pants guy. He is an apocryphal figure to me. I mentioned on Cohost that I actually spent a great deal of my short time as a tester alone in a Faraday cage. I didn't get to interact with many of the other testers on different teams. So, to me, he is a cryptid. A cryptid that other people I knew who were relatively credible people swore up and down existed, but a cryptid all the same to me as far as I am concerned. But god damn if he wasn't a compelling cryptid. If he is a real person, I sincerely wish him well. I hope sandwich pants guy out there is doing okay.
Now, how sandwich pants guy got his name is that he would bring two sandwiches to work. He had his regular lunchtime sandwich, and then he had a secret sandwich that he would sometimes eat when the team leads (who were the actual Nintendo employees) weren't looking. He would pull out a sandwich from his pants and then eat it. But, before he would eat it, he would offer some to any of his co-workers because he was not above sharing. None of his co-workers took him up on the offer.
This, on its own, is unremarkable. Whomst've among us have not secreted a stash of contraband food within our clothing to avoid detection from the authorities so that we could eat it later? It was, rather, the way he stored his sandwiches. Which is, he did not keep them in a wrapper or a bag. He just pulled out a completely unwrapped sandwich out of his pants and eat it.
At this point, I should mention the pants. His coworkers quickly realized that he only wore two pairs of basketball shorts for pants, which they realized further down the line was actually a single pair of basketball shorts but reversible; he would just alternate the sides with the workday so that it appeared he was wearing the same two pants.
His pants, also it should be noted, had no pockets.
So where does he store the sandwich? In his pants, is the simple answer. But not in his pockets. Just, in. The pants. Somewhere in the pants. And these are not long pants but basketball shorts. So, somehow, this man was able to procure an already assembled sandwich without a container to hold it all together from his pants in the middle of the work day. Without the sandwich, whole or partial, somehow falling out of his pants.
I have many questions, of course. One is that the idea of storing a sandwich without a wrapper down my pants strikes me as unsanitary and not very food safe. The second is that the idea of storing a sandwich without a wrapper down my pants strikes me as uncomfortable. I have a very strict, infamous "no food on the bed" rule in my house; I do not like crumbs against my skin in any way and putting an unwrapped sandwich down my pants seems like a really good way to get crumbs in my pants. This deeply unsettles me. Maybe more than the food safety issues. But also, how? How does one operate in the world with a loose sandwich in one's pants without the sandwich simply coming apart? Why is he not picking out the individual pieces and assembling the sandwich post-procurement? How is the sandwich able to keep its form, as if it is gently and carefully cradled in a pocket dimension and not in someone's pants?
This is why I say that to me he is apocryphal, a myth, a cryptid, a story older testers tell the younger testers to scare them into behaving and going to bed on time. Because how does he do that? How does he hold an entire ass sandwich (I realize a poor choice of words as I wrote that down) in his pants, uncontained, and then withdraw it, still assembled, from within some god damn basketball shorts? It simply isn't done, not just on a social but also a physical level.
I do not know. But I know people who swear up and down that this is a real person. And every time I am reminded of sandwich pants guy, I am plagued with the same damn questions that I will never receive the answer to.
And now, dear reader, neither will you.