Buffet bastards

Whilst on my recent trip to Portugal I stayed in a hotel it was nice enough, apart from everything being miles away from everything else, and the staff were reasonably friendly. However, the inclusive breakfast was a buffet style arrangement with all the continental usuals, various fruits, cold meats, cheeses, bread rolls and yoghurts. Plus some fried eggs and bacon so that the Brits didn’t starve.

At one end of the buffet line was an industrial toaster. I think it’s an industrial toaster, I’m not entirely sure what the proper name is, but it’s a big, silver, toasting machine. That makes toast. It’s a fairly self-explanatory machine. At one end it has a Gladiators style travelator type contraption upon which you place untoasted bread, and after passing unseen through the engine bit in the middle, out comes perfect toast at the other end. And without a single John Fashanu “Awooga” to be heard. In a truly inspired additional benefit to this already magnificent machine, the time it takes for the toast to appear is almost exactly the time it takes to wander along the length of the buffet line to get the rest of your breakfast. It truly is man at his most ingenious.

You put bread in. It gets toasted. It appears at the other end approximately 60 seconds later. Simple.

Or so you’d think.

I put in my bread, and wander to collect my cooked meats and cheese as I was feeling extremely continental. I pick up a yoghurt too on my return to the industrial toaster where I await my perfect toast. It does not appear. I wait a little longer, as perhaps I’d been a little quicker at the buffet this morning but it still does not appear. I try and look inside but it’s positioned such that I can’t see clearly all the way through. An elderly lady puts some bread on the travelator, and stands there waiting. I think about giving her a lecture on time management, and the opportunity she’s missing by not getting the rest of her breakfast rather than waiting, but I think better of it. She probably hasn’t got anything better to with the 60 seconds she’ll save anyway.

About one minute later her toast appears. But not mine. It’s clear at this point that either it’s stuck, or someone has stolen my toast whilst I was attending to my mixed meats and cheeses. There’s no smoke, so there must be a thief on the loose. Who the fuck steals toast? Or has someone simply taken it for what they believe to be a magic toast making machine? Surely the untoasted bread at the side gives away what it actually does? Do they think it just produces Toast from thin air?

Those toast thieving bastards meant I lost two minutes of my short holiday by forcing me to watch over the machine like Pirate over his gold. Did you know a small growl is enough to convince people that their bread doesn’t need to be toasted?