Just like any other part of the country, Iowa is peppered with endless fast food restaurants competing for your appetite, as well as your wallet. When one sees the commercials for these places, you get this image that follows you into the establishment. You expect to see people smiling all around serving you. Happy teenagers dancing with mops and smiles as big as hub caps, man. This is rarely, if ever, the case in my experience, but then again, a lot of things aren’t as they appear on television in my experience. No – you pretty much have to make the best of the surroundings when you enter one of these establishments. Sometimes your experience is something very different indeed.
One evening I was craving a Big Mac, and a Quarter Pounder maybe. I tend to get over-indulgent with the board of fare in these places. After I got all of my accessories taken care of, a cup of ketchup to dunk my fries in, a straw, and some napkins, I settled myself into a booth, unaware of the dinner theatre that awaited me.
I had no more than taken my first bite when all of the sudden this couple came in, the man looking serious. I mean serious, man. This guy – I didn’t know 
if he was going to pull out a gun, complain, who knows, right? He asks the manager kid if he was indeed Chad or whatever the Hell his name was. He finally admitted to this biker dude that, yes, he was indeed the “Chad” in question, to which the guy’s response was to grab his collar, a-la right-out-of-the-movies, man – he lifts the manager kid (who was no sack of flour himself) right off the floor and says to him, “if you ever-EVER TOUCH MY DAUGHTER AGAIN- SO HELP ME I – WILL – KILL –YOU!”
My god! This was quite a treat. Who would have thought, huh? So the guy said his peace there and drops the kid back down and just leaves. That’s all it took to get the message across, I guess. The kid looked like he had just seen his own death, and then, realizing where he was, tried his best to gather up what little composure he had left, mumbled something, and then sloughed off to the back of the kitchen.
Now, the rest of the people in the place just stared for a bit, waiting for like – I don’t know… Act Two? The scary biker dad had long since left the scene by now, but the thrill lingers in these rare occasions. I sat there and ate the rest of my unhealthy dinner, just like the others in the place, leaving with a tale to tell.
I still tell this story often, and the one thing I always ask myself is how much pull did this manager kid lose with his employees, right? I mean, was he more or less likely to break into the old, tired “if you got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean” routine, or did he lighten up on them, hoping that word of this incident would never reach the ears of the people that he had to report to. Life sometimes simply hands us more questions than answers in these matters, but it is not a scene you will find in a television commercial. My guess is that he worried up until the time two days later or so when his boss dismissed him.