The Dangerous Drive-Thru

Laki's in town, which is real treat since ey possesses a lot of wisdom and a mean game of basketball to boot. Last night, I fetched Laki from the airport, after which we entered the world's longest drive-thru lane for In-n-Out where we waited and swapped stories. When we were finally just a few cars from reaching our food, we watched as an In-n-Out employee left the building to speak to someone in the car in front of us. The body language and facial expressions led us to believe this interaction was hardly positive. I joked that what would transpire was the employee would grab a tub of fry grease and throw it through the customer's window, scalding eir face. We had this conversation with my window rolled down, but figured the worker couldn't hear us. We prepared our witness testimony for when we were inevitably interviewed by the news about the grease assailant.

I got sidetracked at the mention of "the news," giddily relaying my favorite story of the moment. On the Fourth of July, on a television in a liquor store, I watched a local news station do a story on the annual international hot dog eating competition. To bring in some local interest, the station also staged a backyard three person hot dog eating contest, too. Initially, the reporter seemed fairly professional about the event. When a winner was declared, the reporter asked how it felt to win. The winner smiled, "It feels great. I'm sure my parents are thinking how proud they are of me now." The reporter snipped, "I bet my parents would say the same thing: I went to journalism school and now I'm judging a hot dog eating contest." The thinly-veiled passive aggression was both awkward and hysterical. I only wish I could have seen the conversation that occurred after the segment concluded. Why isn't this clip on YouTube?

As this story wrapped up, out of the corner of my eye, I spied the employee re-exit the kitchen with a vat of fry grease. Ey strode past the car ey spoke to before and approached mine instead. "Oh my gosh, Laki! [Ey]'s coming this way!" I said frightened before screaming. Similarly, Laki was instantly terrified, shuddering and cowering at the sight. As it turned out, the worker was just dumping the grease on the median of lawn (that can't be good for the grass) next to our car. The worker, hearing the scream and seeing our panic-striken faces, peered at us with confusion. Quickly, our terror subsided and we instead broke into laughter at our own ridiculousness. We managed to work ourselves into a frenzy over a scenario we fabricated. It's like I'm an adolescent who made up a ghost story to scare my friends, then believed it myself to the point where I couldn't sleep at night.