At work, we have a room where staff can, if they choose, go and sit to eat their lunch. On most occasions I take advantage of this since it a) is warm and b) carries less risk of being attacked by pigeons. Normally, when I go up there, the room is empty and I eat my sandwiches alone and read whatever book it is I’m reading at the time. Today though, everything changed.

I entered the room and discovered somebody else sitting in there. This is not a problem under most circumstances but today I had the misfortune of bringing to work with me, boiled egg sandwiches. My first instinct was to turn and run. If I went to eat them near a blocked drain, I would at least be able to blame the smell on that. No though, that would look rude or obvious or something like that, so I decided to stick it out and try to get through the ordeal with as much dignity as possible. “Can I sit in here?” I ask. “Of course” he replies. I figured that as a basic act of human decency, I should warn him of what was about to happen and that the best way to do that would be to make a joke out of it. “I warn you now” I said, “I have egg sarnies. This will not be pretty!” He laughed at this and then went back to reading his paper and so I bit the bullet.

I opened my lunchbox and nearly fainted at the stench!

“Bloody HELL!” I thought to myself, trying to fight the urge to gag. I began taking the sandwich out of the 3 individual bags I had placed them in. With each layer, the smell intensified to the point where if you looked really closely you were able to see a green mist emanating from the sandwich. It was getting embarrassing. In the absence of any form of air freshener, I became desperate. At one point I even considered breaking wind in order to mask the pong, but my fear of ‘having an accident’ prevented me from doing this, so I casually yet frantically wafted my book around to try and disperse the egg fumes!

Thankfully, my efforts were successful and I was able to eat my lunch in peace. Or, at least, that was the plan. And this brings me back to the painful silence. If I had had any idea of how embarrassing the next ten minutes would be, I would have put the TV on before sitting down, or better yet, found a hole to crawl into and eaten there. I raised the sandwich to my mouth and took a bite, a small amount of egg fell out of the bread and plopped onto my lap. I looked over and fortunately, my colleague was still staring intently at his paper and still looking somewhat nauseated. So, I quickly swiped the egg back into my lunchbox and started to chew the bit of sandwich that still sat in my mouth.

Each chew seemed louder than the one that came before it. It sounded like a farmer walking through a bog or something. I slowed down my pace, thinking that stealth was the key. “Chew like a Ninja, Claire!” I told myself. This just made me sound like a severely arthritic farmer walking through a bog.

Not only this, but I also looked like a psychopath devising an evil scheme. I raised my eyebrow and chuckled to myself but then remembered the nightmare at hand.

Another thing I came to realise today was, I squeak-squelch when I swallow. The more I noticed it the louder it seemed to get. He must have heard me. I tried a diversionary tactic, rustling the pages of my book upon each swallow but this just made matters worse, because the egg kept falling out of the sandwich and onto the floor. I had the brilliant idea of sipping orange juice with each mouthful of sandwich to try to make it go down easier but that made matters worse because as well as the squeak being louder, I got a weird gurgling sound coming up from my belly. The gurgle sounded reminiscent of a terrified dog. I glanced over, he was still looking hard at the newspaper. He was either unaware of the situation, or horrified to the point of denial.

I decided at this point that the best course of action was to finish the sandwich as quickly as possible and get the hell out. So, I did, and then my jaw started clicking, adding to the symphony of other eating sounds. I finished them though, eventually and thought to myself “Yesssss”. Then I remembered I had the rest of the orange juice and thought “Noooooo”. I sipped it through the straw, painfully slowly. Slurp slurp slurp. When I swallowed, I realised the sound had changed from a squeak to a semi-meow. So, in one last-ditch effort to get it over with, I drank the whole lot down in one go. Slurp squeak squelch meow! And then, the carton gave a big belch of it’s own. At this point I threw it in the bin, grabbed my bag and said ‘bye’ as casually as I could before running out of the door.