It’s been more than six months since the last installment of Slummin’ It, and that’s because I generally don’t go out of my way to eat terrible sandwiches. Sometimes I find myself in an establishment that promises 1600 calories full of burger (and fries?), a giant stupid pile of the usual lettuce/tomato/beef, plus a helping of pulled pork and some onion rings. I like big, stupid sandwiches in an abstract sense, and occasionally in real life. Buffalo Wild Wings is the kind of crap-on-the-walls establishment that should really excel at big, stupid sandwiches, so I was genuinely looking forward to what they could muster up.

This wasn’t the worst hamburger I’ve ever eaten in my entire life, but it does join a very short list of sandwiches I wasn’t willing to finish. It was dry and bland, the patty too thin to be anything other than well done, a meager offering of two onion rings, the whole thing just a sad display, like some manner of firework spinning in sad circles on the ground, putting out clouds of smoke.

I want to be clear that I did not expect this burger to be good. I expected gusto, not quality. I wasn’t expected pulled pork that had been lovingly smoked, I was expecting something that came out of a bucket and was reheated before being drenched in sauce. I was expecting sub-TGI Friday’s food, and I was still incredibly disappointed. It was just a bad sandwich, and that’s a bottom line that’s hard to escape. Modest or grandiose, at family-run landmark establishments or the Funnest Feedbag in all Fifty States, a bad sandwich is just a bad sandwich.