In 2005, Amy and I drove down to Disneyworld in June (in a car with no air conditioning) to meet a bunch of my imaginary internet friends and hang out for a few days. We left very early in the morning in order to beat as much traffic as possible and maybe try not to boil in our own flesh before arrival. Driving all through the day and into the evening, we eventually ended up someplace in South Carolina at a Holiday Inn Express. It was very newly constructed and extraordinarily nice and a pleasant sight for road-weary eyes. Amy took a shower and I set off in search of nourishment.
The options were fairly limited. There was a Waffle House (a chain that has yet to receive my patronage though I keep meaning to visit), an IHOP (ditto) and a KFC. Being very tired and feeling completely nonadventurous, I opted for KFC. I ordered a couple of grilled chicken wraps with fries with my brain pretty much in neutral. Grilled chicken was a very recent concept to KFC at the time and so I may have had to repeat myself a time or two (the Canadian/South Carolinian language barrier may have played a role as well). The fries turned out to be homefries which is not normally a problem. The problem sprang from the fact that they were taken directly from the deep fryer and dumped unceremoniously into the bag. Not a special fry bag but right into the actual bag that I was intended to carry back out to my car. Grease soaked through immediately turning a formerly opaque paper bag into my “window to weight gain.” I had no idea where to even set it down that it wouldn’t ruin everything it touched.
On our way back to the north on that same trip, we stopped somewhere in Tennessee at a Taco Bell in order to suffer terribly stuff our faces consume “nourishment.” There was quite a long line-up both to order and to pick up orders (those southerners love their Grade F beef) and so they had a system of numbers for orders. When an order was filled, somebody would call out the number and the lucky person who had that number would go up and get their “food.” The woman calling the numbers had a nigh-impenetrable hispanic accent and so the situation was ripe for confusion.
I thought I heard my number called and so went forward to pick it up. I checked through the bag and it was pretty plainly not my order but I was convinced that I had heard my number and would not be swayed. I started to tell the woman that this was not what I had ordered and she got this deer-in-the-headlights kind of look about her and was completely unresponsive. As far as I can recall, I didn’t get irate or loud or anything, I just tried to explain that I had in fact ordered something totally other. Same petrified look. After perhaps a minute or two of this, the good old boy running the pop machine looked over (despite having been in earshot the entire time) and said “Sir, she don’t speak no english.” Thanks for that, Sparky. Where were you when I started causing an International Incident?