As a youth, I found perfection in an unlikely spot: the Hanover High School cafeteria.

For about a dollar, I would order a grilled ham and cheese on a bulkie. Minutes later, one of the cooks — I remember all their faces — delivered a sandwich. The cut faces of the bun were just crisped, the lone slice of ham, covered by a melted carpet of cheese, showed the gentlest browning from the heat. I ate it off of a small paper plate. In my memory, it rivals the original Star Wars in its awesomeness.

I am a bit of a sandwich geek. I love to make them, admire them, share them. In my perambulations around the Upper Valley, I have found a quality egg and cheese in Norwich, a great Rachel in Quechee and a legitimate turkey club in Lebanon.

The flip side of that enthusiasm is, of course, disappointment. While I applaud a perfect Cuban, I also feel sadness when something as beautiful as a Gobbler is ruined by carelessness, recklessness, or, worst of all, indifference. More and more, our noontime has been infested with a series of epidemics that, collectively, are threatening the future of lunch. As I don’t want to get blackballed anywhere, I won’t name the businesses or homes where I have experienced these offenses. Keep get your antennae up, though: They are out there.

Mounding occurs when a huge amount of the principal ingredient is piled in the middle of bread, with nothing around the perimeter. The result makes you work through the edges of crust with no featured product, only to encounter a middle-sandwich that requires you to stretch your jaw like a python to get around the mound.

If religious scholars asked me for an eighth deadly sin, I would suggest gristling, which is allowing a piece of bone, sinew or cartilage to infiltrate a perfectly balanced chicken salad. You discover it mid-bite, like finding a band-aid in a swimming pool. Even your spouse is grossed out when you have to dispose of the offending matter.

Speaking of your sex life, spiking will temporarily end it. I do not know anyone who enjoys raw red onions, but there they are, unadvertised and uninvited, tucked into your veggie pita pocket, snuck into your wrap, and lumped on your brisket. When you’re done, your breath is so harsh not even you would kiss you.

Sadly, perhaps because of our geographic location, pinking — using tomatoes the hue of cotton candy instead of deep red — is everywhere. If your pink also has crunch, I suspend you from sandwiches, with a sentence of gluey clam chowder, chicken-less chicken noodle and watery vichyssoise. Apologies … soup problems are for another day.

Nothing spoils a quality sandwich like a bad case of roughing, when the top of the bread is so craggy that it shreds the roof of your mouth. The only positive here is that the pain usually comes later, allowing you to at least enjoy the meal in the moment.

My vegetarian friends suffer grave indignities, the most pervasive of which is afterthoughting: “We forgot a vegetarian option! Quick! Put some cubed sweet potato, sauerkraut, ranch dressing and iceberg lettuce on focaccia.” Worse, though, isslopping, the age-old practice of throwing every available vegetarian ingredient between slices of bread. The results are disgraceful and terrifying. Slippery, limp peppers collide with chunky artichoke hearts. A poorly roasted Portobello commingles with radishes. A wet tangle of alfalfa sprouts drowns in vinaigrette. Who invited hummus and cucumbers? This recipe belongs in a trough, but vegetarians often have no choice, and so work their way through, the fillings sliding and oozing out the sides of the heavily-seeded bread that cannot maintain its integrity, crumbling in between their fingers. (Don’t get me started on the grotesque practice of mismatching, wherein one marries the wrong ingredients with the wrong bread. A Reuben does not belong on an English muffin.)

Surely, you know that feeling of ingredients that spill out the side of the sandwich. Well, that is overstuffing, a problem Americans probably invented. In France, the most famous sandwich is jambon buerre, or ham and butter. They swipe butter on a split baguette and layer one thin slice of ham on top. Period. Contrast that with a Dagwood.

Quicking is sure to send the Disappointment-O-Meter into the red. Inexplicably, the home cook is a common perpetrator of this fiasco. Grilled cheese, turkey and tuna melts, croque-monsieurs … all require patience. Any of these removed from the heat before the cheese has melted saddens God.

Condiment rationing is intensely personal, and it is hard to argue for a one-size-fits all. There is no “correct” amount of sandwich lubricant. Nevertheless, it is best to avoid some pitfalls. A good barometer: if there is a quarter-inch of condiment visible on the outside edges of the bread, you are a victim of slathering. When that ratio is off, especially in a mounding-slathering double-whammy, you can end up with a mouthful of arugula, bread crust and a tablespoon of spicy Dijon mustard. Conversely, undressing can be insanely aggravating. You have grabbed a pre-made turkey and swiss from the cooler only to realize when you sit down to eat that it has no condiments. It’s a drywall sandwich. If you remembered the little foil packets of mustard and mayo, even the most delicate among us spill them all over our shirts.

There are smaller infractions. While it is true that missing — when someone’s aim is off and the sandwich is not in “half” but in a one-third/two-thirds division — is annoying, we will get by. We will also survive thicking (bread slices that are an inch thick), cheaping (using bad industrial bread or shoddy ingredients and selling them at premium prices), fiddling (altering the core ingredients of a named or classic sandwich — the Elvis, the chicken parm, the Fluffernutter) to make it inferior to the original, or safing (making the same sandwich every day for all eternity).

Despite all these issues, I am hopeful. Soon it will be tomato season, an invitation to the greatest sandwich of all time, the BLT. Making one correctly at home takes at least 30 minutes. Those two humble slices of bread are a canvas, and you are Picasso. Treat them with respect. Do not settle. The rewards are extraordinary.

Take it from someone who knows.

Mark Lilienthal lives in Norwich. He can be reached at mlilient@gmail.com.