Finger lickin' dumb!

I have always been a fan of chicken. Well… really only the white meat. Because of this, I think that KFC is probably the best of the fast food restaurants. So today, I decided to partake in some delicious chicken from the Colonel’s Streetwise value menu. The closest KFC to me is usually pretty slow, but it’s quicker than finding a faster KFC that is probably much further away.

The service today was particularly slow. I ended up waiting about 25 minutes for a simple value meal and watched about 10 people ordering 15 piece meals come and go almost instantly. It made me a little bit angry, but once I had the sweet chicken grease flowing through my veins all was forgiven. Plus they gave me a free bag of Two-Bite Brownies for my inconvenience.

There was a silver-lining however. I’m not sure if anyone else notices this, but KFC attracts a lot of seniors. So I got to witness some senior citizens struggle with situations in everyday life that seem trivial to me, which made me wonder how they have survived this long.

First off, about three-quarters of them couldn’t figure out why they got empty cups with their orders. The simple premise of filling up their own beverages was met with a lot of blank stares. Also, finding straws, salt, pepper, and ketchup was a bit of task for most of them. Good thing they live in an age of convenience. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to live in a time where you had to hunt and/or gather your own food.

Next, operating the PIN-pad for the new credit cards with the chip was pretty much impossible. This one old lady just wouldn’t enter her PIN. She tried 4 times and would just press OK instead of inputting the numbers. The cashier kept instructing her to input her PIN and the old lady would say she understood and then she just wouldn’t. I think she was probably just ignoring the cashier, because when she was told her order number after she finally figured how to enter a 4-digit number for her transaction to work, she immediately forgot it and started asking other customers, including me, if they knew their order number so she could figure her own out.

My favourite old person of the day was an American man. He decided it would be fine to pay in both American and Canadian currency for his meal. I could understand how to rationalize paying in just American, maybe forgetting which country he was in, but he thought it would be best to use both. In all my travels, I couldn’t imagine even attempting this. Besides one time haggling in a market in The Dominican Republic, I have never even considered using a currency any other than the kind designated to that country. The KFC literally shares a parking lot with a bank as well, so he could’ve exchanged his money. And, yes, the bank was open. Then the guy tries to pay with a $100 bill. I guess he decided to just ignore the sign attached to the cash register directly in front of him that says they don’t accept $100 bills. Maybe that’s why he tried to use both currencies, but he could’ve asked instead of presuming they’d prefer to take multiple kinds of currencies. This is the kind of jerk who set the American stereotype. Anyway, they ended up taking the 100, probably because they figured he wasn’t bright enough to acquire counterfeit money.

This may come across as me being angry or cruel. Well… I probably am being cruel. These events actually made me happy. I had a good laugh at their expense, but it’s not like I said anything to their faces. So their feelings aren’t hurt, because they will never know. I suppose they could find this on the Internet and read about it. Although I have a hard time believing these people are even literate never mind about computer savvy.