Culture... REAL Culture

I'm a college student. My wife is an extremely bored sales associate at a department store. Neither of us really interacts much with people outside of our personal social sphere. Tonight, we were exposed to a decent cross-section of some of the other types of people out there.

Lauren had a craving for burgers tonight, and for some reason that neither of us really understand, she was craving, of all places, McDonald's. Going to McDonald's is an experience in which we take part once every six to eight months. Naturally, anything more often that that just isn't good for one's health (twice a year is bad enough). Below are some of the scenes we observed during tonight's semiannual gastrointestinal trials.

Horny High-Schoolers

I know you've seen this. A boy and a girl just beginning to enter sexual maturity, but they have no idea what to do with it. Consequently, they spend all their free time all over each other, completely oblivious to other people. There was a couple tonight who actually bothered to order some food, but spent most of the time with the girl sitting on her boyfriend's lap, straddling him and eating his face, rather than her food. It was awful.

Bad Parents

We saw two examples of this. We saw a man with three kids: a little boy and girl who were both enjoying their own Happy Meals, and a baby who spent the majority of the time sleeping in its little carseat-carrier-thingy. The two toddlers happily played with their Happy Meal toys while their father spent almost the entire time talking to someone on his cell phone. He completely ignored his children. So sad. We also saw a father get some food to go, and then loudly threaten his son of probably 4 years that "If you open that Happy Meal before we get in the car, I SWEAR I'll throw that toy away. I SWEAR." Nice. That's the way to get your child to love and respect you: verbal abuse and public humiliation.

Grifters
I'm not really sure if 'Grifters' is a word, so in case it isn't, I'm referring to an 'Artful Dodger' kind of person.

I don't know the details of what happened. I just overheard the tail end of a conversation between the manager and a man with dyed-black hair and several facial piercings (somewhat unusual, for Provo). This man claimed he had spoken to a woman last night, around midnight, and that she had written something down somewhere, and for some reason, this man was entitled to three free sandwiches. I'm guessing someone messed up his order or something, and he didn't realize it until he got home and called back to complain, but didn't want to return to the store. Not only did the manager have no notification from this 'girl' this man had spoken with, but the manager also said that there were no women working that time of night at all. The man persisted. This story is kinda boring, but what shocked me was that in the end, this man kept pushing until he got the three sandwiches he was demanding: two double quarter pounders and some chicken sandwich. That's about fifteen dollars' worth of food, for a story that was CLEARLY made up. I could easily make up a more airtight story than that. Easy.

Who knows what we'll encounter next time we feel like punishing our stomachs with a few ounces of putrid grease? Maybe we'll see a homosexual? A lion tamer? Or, perhaps most rare of all in Provo: a black person?