If you say that you don’t get bored at work, I’m going to assume that you’re either a trauma surgeon or you’re a liar. Everyone has had those Wednesdays that stretch on for several weeks, when your eyes glaze over and you start to daydream about changing careers to become a private detective or a circus performer or, like, the kind of influencer who gets free Doritos.
Or maybe you get so bored that you just… mash several sausage links together, flatten it out and turn it into a terrifying meat face that you quietly slip into a package of bangers.
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According to the Swindon Advertiser, Fran Webster threw a 20-pack of ALDI sausages into her shopping cart, and probably assumed that she wouldn’t open it up and see a smiling sausage face staring back at her. But that’s pretty much what happened, and she seems to regard these cursed byproducts with both fear and reverence. “I’d like to give the person who did it a high five. It’s amazing,” she said. “But it does make you worry about eating the sausages that were in the packet.”
She stared into its heavily processed eyes, smelled it (she said it smelled “like meat,” which is reassuring), and then wrapped it in foil and put it in the freezer. “The kids wanted to eat it, but I was a bit concerned about the fact the workers have been able to do that,” she told the Advertiser. “That’s worrying.”
Webster threw the 12 non-sentient sausages into the trash, but the inch-thick meat face was spared. Maybe it’ll become a treasured family heirloom, that will be passed down from generation to generation, until the technology to bring it to life has been developed. Maybe she’ll open the freezer door in the single-digit hours of the night, peel back the foil, and shout “COMMAND ME, PORK LORD” and wait for its instructions. Or maybe it will just get pushed behind boxes of crystallized waffles and last summer’s strawberries until it’s inevitably thrown out without fanfare.
Despite finding the sausage face (or because of it?), she says she’ll continue to do her grocery shopping at ALDI. “Someone clearly got bored on their shift,” she said. “I’m more concerned about quality control.”
ALDI is concerned about it as well. “We apologize to Ms Webster and have offered her a refund on this product,” a spokesperson for the company said. “We’re currently speaking to our supplier to understand how this could have happened.”
We know how it happened. Everyone who’s spent a weekday afternoon rearranging the icons on their desktop and wondering whether Adult Detective School is really a thing knows exactly how it happened.