For the average office dweller, dawdling through average meetings, it’s the little things that get you through some days, and those little things tend to involve food.

For whatever reason, cubicles tend to bring out the hunter-gatherers in us all and we spend inordinate amounts of time foraging for meeting leftovers. I can’t even begin to count how often I’ve caught myself thinking, "Hmmm... This isn’t going so well, but at least I’ve got that sandwich for lunch."

On this particular day, it wasn’t going well. In fact, it was going badly. Even worse, I had forgotten my lunch altogether. I needed a caper, or at the very least some small diversion, to smash through the monotony of the grey Wednesday I was having. It was like I was in Grade Three again and needed a field trip to the fire hall or dairy.

"Oy! Scott!" I yelled across the hall. "You want to get a Vietnamese sub for lunch?"

I knew Scott would be up for it. He indulges me, and enjoys a diversion too. He’ll walk through the mall with me and Darren, all of us pretending to be riders in the Tour de France peloton. He didn’t even mind it when I got a little over-zealous and crashed him into a fat man to spring Darren free for a sprint finish, so I knew a bus trip down Jasper to Saigon Givral wouldn’t be a problem.

Saigon Givral isn’t literally a hole in the wall, but it’s really, really close. As we stood crammed together with the other patrons (there are no tables here), I watched my chicken satay sub being assembled while Scott played with the Statistics Canada Census data wheel on the board behind me. Occasionally, Scott would shout out some mildly amusing demographic about the population of Prince Albert or Whitehorse, but I was only half listening. I was too busy thinking about French colonialism.

I’ve read Camus and Fanom. I understand the economic exploitation, land alienation, and violence inherent in imperial colonial endeavors. But if nothing else, the Vietnamese at least got one hell of a good sandwich out of the French. On the other hand, maybe the Vietnamese got one over on their occupiers. The French Pan Bagnat, which is essentially a salad Nicoise (olives, peppers, basil, eggs, capers and grilled tuna) in a Como loaf, is by all accounts a tasty enough sandwich. But, after so many years of French occupation, the Vietnamese, I guess, had had enough. They stole the Pan Bagnat from the French, appropriated the baguette, put a decidedly Vietnamese twist on it, and really made the whole thing sing. As far as I can tell, the Vietnamese are much more thrill-seeking when it comes to their food, and I think their version of the sub (bahn mi) must have had an "anything goes" genesis.

"You like chilies and cilantro? OK." Bam. In they go.

"What about Pate? Doesn’t really go with chilies and cilantro... What the hell, in it goes." Bam.

"Sriracha hot sauce? Pickled carrots? Fish sauce? Scrappy bits of meat?" Whatever! Bam, bam, bam!

The good folks at Saigon Givral don’t adhere to rigorously to the norms of Vietnamese subs–they melt cheese onto theirs and make them a little more tourist friendly, but they’re still decidedly different, and light years better than anything you’ll get from Quizno’s or Subway. Damn fine food really and a nice change from the run of the mill lunch sandwiches.

Back at the office, after much jocularity about how profusely my head was sweating (I asked for the works on mine, but forgot to mention that I wanted the works... for gringos), we eventually settled into our work routines again. The diversion had worked. My outlook had changed. The apathy I started the day with was gone. We had successfully kept ordinary at bay.

I smiled and screamed defiantly across the hall to Scott: "Subs love colonialism!"