So, I ride there in my suit, park my bike by a big log, walk up to the counter. This kiosk is in a temporary transportable thing while the old building awaits reconstruction. It's small, and basic. There are three items on the lunch menu: pie with sauce, pastie with sauce, sausage roll with sauce. I haven't eaten tomato sauce for a very long time, but it looks like this is going to be the day. I ask the counter lady for a pastie with sauce. I know that Australian pasties contain meat, something I don't normally eat, but I decide to assume that this one won't contain any noticeable traces. They rarely have before. I've sometimes wondered why they bothered attempting to add it in the first place.
I take the lukewarm pastie in a little paper bag and the container of sauce she gives me and go sit on the log, surrounded by ravens in full beard. They white-eye me, I white-eye them back and they decide to go bother someone else for a while. This gives me the peace and quiet to contemplate life (always interesting), the log (too slippery and possibly marking my suit), the lake (set for redevelopment as an example of Australian pre-history), the pastie (remind me again why I'm eating this?) and the sauce in its little double packet. I've never seen one of these before.
The last time I ate tomato sauce on roving lunch was in highschool, at boarding school. Every Friday a lunch truck would pull up to one of the back entrances to the school and all the hostel kids would line up and get a free takeaway lunch instead of having to make our own sandwiches in the morning like usual. Lunch was a pie or pasty, an apple, and a lamington. We'd get sauce, in a little square packet, and you grabbed the little pull tab corner, pulled at it for a while until you got a fingernail underneath and the top started to come off, then try and get the sauce onto your pie while dodging the bits thrown out of the packet by inertia. My friends stopped sitting with me on Fridays. They said they were grossed out by the way I ate the pie. I didn't see what was wrong with eating the lid, then scooping out the innards with the now-empty sauce container - it wasn't nearly as messy as the usual way of eating. One brave friend later explained to me that pies were designed so that you didn't have to see the inside.
Sauce packets have changed since then. This one has two sachets, which kind of look like they used to, except there's no pull tab. There is however a little pyramid-thing in the centre, made of different plastic to the rest. I sift my memories, pull out an image of one of the more "Aussie blokes" I know eating takeaway, squishing the two halves of the packet together to get sauce out, then throwing the empty packet over his shoulder. I look closely at the pyramid thing and it appears to be designed so that pulling the two sauce sections together will open the pyramid. So I press the sauce sections lightly to see if it works. The pyramid opens, explosively, and sprays sauce across my eyes and face. Guess that's a 'yes'. I reflexively go to wipe my eyes, then catch myself just before I get the sauce on my suit sleeve. I need something to wipe it off with before I get it everywhere. There may be a tissue in my pocket, but my hands have sauce over them so I can't get to it. The paper bag seems the best bet. I lean slightly as I reach to my knees for it, and it slips off my lap onto the ground somewhere. I can't see it yet, with sauce in my eyes, but I can hear that the ravens have come back and are quite intrigued by all the stuff this human is dropping. Quite intrigued. Their croaks appear to be coming from the same probable location as the paper bag.
Option number three. The pastie is still sitting on my knee. I wipe the sauce on that, and blink my eyes open. The paper bag is in a nearby tree, on a raven's head. He appears to be trying to get crumbs out of the bottom corners. I wish him luck. I manage to get the sauce off my face - there wasn't really all that much, except in my eyes. The suit, thankfully, appears to be unmarked. It wouldn't normally worry me, except I'm trying very hard to get the people at this meeting to hire me. I tear off a piece of the pastie and look inside. Doesn't look like any meat content. Never does. I eat that piece, and am suddenly reminded why most Australians cover their pasties with large amounts of sauce. I find the sauce packet, still mostly full, and layer it on thickly.
There are days when I'm proud to have taken a role in society that lets me help people adapt to and function effectively within our highly-technology-based and rapidly changing culture. I'm not sure yet if this is one of them.