lack of direction

Some days you just wonder why everyone is so incompetent. 

It started with a packet of cheese sauce mix, as all great stories do. It started in the sense that I found a packet of it. Legitimately found it – in the cupboard, not in the bin or on the street or in the belly of a whale.

Being open to new experiences, some would say to the point of recklessness, I decided to use it to create a poor imitation of macaroni cheese. I’m pretty well seasoned at making actual cheese sauce (and it’s pretty well seasoned, I don’t mind telling you) which is how I have made it to 25 without using a packet of cheese sauce mix.

The only real bonus of cheese sauce mix is that it’s incredibly easy. When making a food decision you have to balance the scales of effort and pleasure. Real cheese sauce takes more effort, but tastes much better, thus provides more pleasure. So at times when a great taste experience is your goal, real cheese sauce is the only way to go. Some days, though, you might want to minimise the effort side of the equation, and are willing to sacrifice pleasure to achieve this aim. Sometimes, though, you are just a reckless fool who has to cook everything you find in the cupboard, for the sole reason that you’re curious.

Being pretty secure in my cheese sauce making abilities, I ripped open the packet and popped the odd smelling contents in the pan. Some would call my instruction-eschewing vigour reckless – I say, who cares, live a little. But on top of being reckless, I’m also pretty curious if you remember. So I took a cursory glance at the instructions to fully immerse myself in the experience.  

My goodness, I’m glad I did – is this not one of the best things you’ve ever seen?

At first glance, perhaps not. But take a look at those instructions. First you pour a little milk into the pan and mix. Fair enough. Following completion of that step you simply have to pour in the remaining milk. Easy.

Wait a minute… remaining in what? You just said put in a little milk. Do I just put in what’s left? What if that was it? What if I was using up the last of the carton? Do I just put up with it being mostly powder? Or do I open a whole new carton and have at it? Or is it all the milk remaining in the house, or the supermarket, or all cows everywhere, for that matter?

You just have to marvel at the exquisite display of incompetence. Maybe not while your woefully undiluted sauce is in danger of burning, but once you’ve used your own judgment to add an amount of milk to the pan that seems not to be completely awful, you can take a minute to really have a good old marvel at just how incompetent everyone in the whole world really is. Not me of course, I am a consummate professional.

Just a minute, what’s that? What do I see in the corner, there?

Did I just tear through the instructions? Maybe everyone really is horrifically incompetent, including me… I mean, someone else has to share in this one, because they put the quantities right along the perforations. They practically tied them to the tracks in the path of an oncoming train.

But wait just one more second – a closer look reveals that it makes 300ml. That’s makes 300ml. Makes. Because cheese sauce increases in volume during cooking. Millilitres, being a measurement of volume, we’re meant to… what? Work out the percentage of expansion, and from there calculate the amount of milk necessary? This seems a lot more complicated than grating a bit of cheese and getting busy with the flour.  

Having seen the cheese sauce through to completion, I think it’s fair to say that the effort it takes to even think about finding a measuring jug is out of whack with the maximum amount of pleasure that is possible to be gained from the whole experience. Working back from the pleasure side of the equation, I think it’s pretty unreasonable to be expected to walk to the fridge for some milk, even, so maybe it’s better to not have any directions, because then one would feel obliged to follow them, and it really isn’t worth it.  

I probably could have guessed that without going through the rigmarole and heartache of actually making (and then eating) the cheese sauce. But I was curious, and I am an empiricist right down to the bone, although I don’t really fancy testing that one.

I also could have guessed that everyone is completely incompetent, but it’s always worth gathering some good hard evidence. I’m amassing quite a cache of raw data on the utterly confounding state the world is in, so if there’s a budding scientist out there wanting to study the countless fuckups we indulge in on a daily basis, I’m in. We might win a Nobel Prize, for mathematics or something. Then we can drop the cheque in a smoothie maker and win one for incompetence, too. If it comes with a trophy we can use them as bookends.