Today Subway, the world’s fastest growing lunchmeat sandwich company, joined the sad but worldwide fraternity of restaurants whose only membership requirement is the awesome specter of a PR fiasco.

Mainstream news outlets reported an alleged Australian Facebook vandal sharing an incriminating photo of a “footlong” Subway sandwich next to a ruler measuring its length at a mere eleven inches. These same news outlets failed to ask the bigger question in my mind: shouldn’t a continent that primarily uses the metric system be offering “meterlong” sandwiches? I’d consider moving there.

Subway fans were appalled at this covert product reduction that the company allegedly perpetrated right under their noses. All those paid-for inches of fast food, withheld from countless sandwiches sold in good faith, were clearly a misdeed committed by greedy corporate one-percenters. Millions of enraged citizens responded by driving like mad to the Subway next door to their house, buying a footlong, measuring it, Instagramming the results with an indignant caption, and eating it anyway.

Subway officials claim these substantial shortages were a consequence of bumbling local employees who clearly failed to follow standardized procedures to the letter when baking fresh buns, and who obviously need to be fired and replaced with college graduates. The company has not yet announced a solution to SubwayGate, BunGate, FootlongGate, InchGate, LunchGate, or whatever the media agrees to dub this crisis. Possibly they’re biding their time while all one billion Facebook users coordinate their schedules to file a class-action lawsuit and determine how many trillions of dollars they deserve for the mental cruelty caused by losing those tens of calories they didn’t really miss in the first place.

Regardless, Subway’s public image has taken a vicious blow to the breadbasket. Can we truly trust Subway ever again? What else haven’t they told us? What other shocking secrets are they harboring? One has to wonder if muckraking Internet crusaders will uncover even darker revelations that They don’t want us to know, including but not limited to:

* The meat slices are 75% thinner than they used to be.

* Their bread varieties all have the exact same ingredients, except for a different color of shellac.

* “Eat Fresh” is an anagram for “Sheer Fat”.

* Their name was originally “Superway” until their standards fell and a conscientious board member demanded a more honest image.

* The BMT acronym stands for “Bulgarian Mystery Tofu”.

* If you play the “Five! Five dollar! Five dollar footlong!” jingle backwards, you can hear a demonic voice singing “Call Me Maybe”.

* Chuck wasn’t canceled because of low ratings. Subway overlords decided its time was up.

* Their goal to open a store in every small town with more than fifty residents is merely phase one of their plan to conquer Earth.

* Jared’s real first name is “O.J.”

The people demand to know the truth! We’d also appreciate it if those bags of chips were filled with more chips and less air. In our household, six small tortilla chips are not a side item; they’re a taste test.

(Full disclosure: I’m really not a Subway fan, and not just because of its unremarkable bread quality and miserly meat portions. For budgetary purposes I bring lunchmeat sandwiches to work four lunches per week. When it comes time for other meals, I’m generally craving anything but lunchmeat.)

[Photo credit: me, on our 2011 road trip to New York City. To this day I have no idea why I took that photo.]