COLUMN: The Death of a Brown Paper Sack

By Tobin Barnes
I eat lunch with this guy just about every workday. He teaches science at my school. Used to be a mining engineer before he got into education. His specialty was explosives. But I wouldn’t say “explosive” would describe his personality.

After all, you’ve heard the joke about engineers: How do you tell if an engineer is reserved or outgoing? A reserved engineer, when he’s talking to you, looks at his shoes. An outgoing engineer looks at your shoes.

Of course, that’s an exaggeration. The engineer I work with will even make eye contact once in a while. A better description of him would be my own conception of engineers—organized and efficient.

I’ve talked about him before. He’s the guy who was driving into a big parking lot following the arrows the way they’d like you to. Up ahead, he saw this woman waiting for an opening parking spot, blinking her turn signal indicating she was going to take the spot as soon as the parked car pulled out.

But she was coming down the lane in the wrong direction. In other words, she wasn’t following the arrows. My engineer friend decided to teach her a lesson about parking lot etiquette. When the parked car pulled out, he adroitly slipped into the space himself. The woman was outraged that he’d do such a thing.

Later in the store, when he ran into the woman again, she pointed him out to the woman accompanying her and said, “There’s the (disparaging epithet) who took my parking space.”

But my engineer friend knows you’ve got to be ready to absorb such slings and arrows when you’re organized and efficient in a world that isn’t.

Another example of his engineer’s mind is what he brings to lunch each day—a half sandwich and an apple. No more, no less.

Of course, he’d read that last point and say, “How about you?” And I’d have to admit that I’m somewhat structured myself. After all, I’ve sat in the same place at lunch for years, and I’d also have to admit that for 31 years I’ve brought nothing for lunch but a sandwich as well, and I’m no engineer.

But here’s the difference. I bring a whole sandwich--none of this half-sandwich stuff. And here’s another thing. He’s brought his half sandwich and apple in the same sack for the last two years.

You heard me, the same sack.

Now you can imagine that sack’s gotten pretty ratty in those two years’ time. But he’s organized and efficient, as well as another thing about engineers. He’s determined. He’s saving the earth one sack at a time.

He decided at the beginning of the current school year that if he could use the same sack for one year, he could use the same sack for two years. Three might not be out of the question.

Well, the engineer and I each lunch with this third guy, who also teaches science, and he’s just about as quirky as we are, maybe more so when I think about it. Anyway, the two of us got tired of this engineer going on and on about using the same sack for almost two school years. So we finally took action.

Being organized and efficient, the engineer heads to the can every day right before going back to his classroom, trustingly leaving his sack lying out on the lunch table.

Now what I’m going to tell you probably says more about me and the other guy than it does about the engineer (after all, you’ll see us as conniving while you’ll see him as a blessed, trusting soul), but we’ve been putting little tears in that old beat-up sack for the last two weeks. And although the sack had been in rough shape before, it was dying a quick death now. It soon, due to our nefarious devices, became a sack in name only.

The engineer noticed the difference, of course (he’s a scientist, for crying out loud), but he never suspected his lunchmates as the assassins we’d become. Instead, stiff lipped, he soldiered on, cradling the poor, battered sack from refrigerator to table like a maimed and wounded war buddy. He continued to think the cause of the sack’s painful demise was normal wear and tear. Little did he suspect, regarding the latter cause.

But then today, he finally threw in the sack: “This morning when I was packing my lunch,” he told us, somewhat wistfully, “I put my apple in and it fell out one of the holes. I put it back in, but then the sandwich fell out. I finally gave up.”

We knew it was time to fess up.

“You (disparaging epithets),” he cried.