Blue Fish Canoe has traumatic experience with the general public

About once a year I become overwhelmed with a sense of patriotic duty and I eat fast food. (Go ahead. Gasp. And depending on your socio-economic-o-cultural leanings you may gasp at either the high frequency or low frequency of my fast food dining. Have your gasp and read on…)

This year I spontaneously chose Church’s Chicken, which is a nondenominational Brooklyn ghetto version of KFC and surprisingly the owners of the url, www.churchs.com. I wanted to exchange my money for a piece of chicken and a drink and be on my way. Of course this proved to be impossible. I could only order from a matrix of Value Meals with muffins, potato wedges, French Fries, chicken bits, and drinks from medium to bathtub sized. All meals cost in total over $5 and ended in weird non-whole number sums (eg. $5.72, $6.36 + tax), which was more than I wanted to spend—I could get real food for those sums. I brought my dilemma to the Church’s employee who, judging from his accent and look, may have been a recent immigrant from Africa. He told me of a secret value meal that allowed me to get a piece of chicken and a muffin for $3.21 if I agreed not to get a drink. I accepted. Just before he rang up the $3.21 he asked me if I wanted to Juraso-size the drink that I did not order. Then, despite the whole premise of this exchange resulted from not wanting a drink, a white woman’s voice came from nowhere and asked me the same question, if I wanted to Juraso-size the drink. The voice interrupted me as I was talking to the employee and totally freaked me out. It took me a second to get my bearings, but when I did I realized the voice was in fact not a white woman, but the cash register itself interrupting me. I declined the offer from the cash register.

I got my food and began to eat. I soon discovered the non-drink value meal was not a value meal at all, but a challenge-meal. Church’s chicken and muffins are 50% salt and nearly impossible to eat without a drink. I can only attempt to describe how dehydrating this experience was, but imagine having only a pile of extra salty pretzels to eat after a night of beer drinking after say, crossing the Sahara. For some reason I was determine to win the challenge-meal and I persevered. I finished learning a valuable lesson about turning down offers from cash registers. Looking back on it, I can say the chicken left me slightly nauseous and with a nagging taste in my mouth similar to what one might experience after licking a high school chemistry class beaker. The chemistry beaker flavor is now in its third day of persistence, but I must admit, at first the chicken tasted really good.