I have to tell you about this guy in the office. I know his actual name, but I’ve taken to calling him the Sandwich Maestro. Dude comes out of the break room nearly every day with the perfect sandwich on a paper plate.

It’s magnificent, this sandwich. Awe-inspiring. Sort of like the sandwich you see in a Boar’s Head poster at the deli but can never actually order because it’s made out of photogenic, inedible plastics. It’s like a cartoon of a sandwich—a sandwich Dagwood might eat, piled high with meat and cheese the crispest, greenest lettuce I’ve ever seen. Pretty sure it involves slices of salami and ham. And spicy mustard. Great multigrain bread, too, looks like.

It nearly drove me to madness, though: where did he acquire such a sandwich? The lunchtime offerings down in the Financial District, while plentiful, are not top-tier. You can get a decent sub, but nothing like the radiant heaven of this guy’s sandwiches. He must, I concluded, bring his lunch from home—but this made no sense either! No sandwich survives a rush-hour New York commute looking like that: it’d be half-crushed, the lettuce browning slightly, defeated.

Then, one fateful day, I discovered his secret. Are you ready?

He makes the sandwiches at the office.

HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO BLIND? He stocks the shared fridge with his cold cuts and lettuce at the beginning of the week, then assembles his masterpieces with fresh ingredients and eats it right then. A solution so elegant it would take a genius to conceive of it. Either that or I’m dumb. Also: far too lazy to do this. Guess I’m off to Au Bon Pain.