Grub Street

Everyone’s favorite online ordering tool, Seamless Web, which recently partnered with Zagat, now has a Facebook page, and they’ve posted edgy, viral videos on it in which a couple of bros order “fried water” and stuff! We doubt you’ll have the patience to watch, so we’ll just give you the good news coming out of the Seamless camp: You can now place orders for pickup rather than just delivery! Meanwhile, a friend of Grub Street, Hugh Gallagher, is at work on a tell-all about working at the place. Literary agents and movie producers, we invite you to read this exclusive snippet, and contact us if you have a million dollars to offer for The Devil Orders Enchiladas.

I work at Seamless Web, the premier online menu ordering system for corporate New York. On paper, my job is to upload menus into the system, to create a “seamless” online ordering experience for our executive clientele. That’s only on paper, for in theory, I absorb pain. I have learned, through meticulous agony, that Ease of Use is inversely proportionate to Pain of Creation. Through a blinding, soul wrecking matrix of options, scroll down screens, clicks, drags, and pummeling “option F” missions, I have pounded menus into the vast and Orwellian “II”. (Seamless Web’s Internal –or, ‘Infernal’- Interface.) On long, agonizing days, in a windowless, airless 10X15 office (shared with 4 others) I have toiled. I have toiled so that corporate lawyers may eat alone, late at night, while neglecting the ones they love. I have toiled so that masters of abstract markets may snack on cold sushi, while casually destroying The Dollar. Screen by screen, I eliminate dinnertime. Day by day, I empower the corporate void. Click by click, I build potential sandwiches.

Takers?