“That doesn’t taste right. Oh my god, I’ve been poisoned!”
I’m not proud to admit it, but back when I was a decade or so into my (now lapsed) vegetarianism, I once yakked up after having a few bites of a “Western” omelette that I was mistakenly served instead of a mushroom omelette. Of course, there was no intrinsic quality of the ham that forced my stomach to reject it - it was a trick that my mind worked.
Something similar may have happened to the officer.
However, I don’t understand the supervisor trying to “thump the salt off.” Is one burger pattie so vital to the profit of this joint that you couldn’t just throw that one away and make another?
Reminds me of the commercial where the bored waitress brings the guy a sandwich. He looks at it and says he ordered it without mayo. So she wipes the mayo off the top slice on the edge of the table.
Fast food joints tend to be staffed by idiots and/or people who don’t really give a fuck about doing a good job. The competent workers soon find other employment.
Doesn’t like the taste of his free food, starts to feel sick, gets pissed, and drives back to Mickey D’s to hold someone accountable.
Demands to know who prepared the burger, is told burger was accidentally over-salted, doesn’t believe it for a second, takes cook outside (where there are less/no witnesses), tells her she better stop fucking lying to him and start confessing that she intentionally tried to “poison” him.
Cook sticks to her story about the salt, she is threatened with arrest and jail (a very popular intimidation tactic).
Cook continues to stick to the salt story, cop does quick self-assessment and determines that he is one hell of a inadequate cop if he can’t even intimidate a young black female.
Cop loses all perspective on situation at this point and is now only focused on restoring his own self-worth as a Big, Strong, Competent Lawman to be feared and revered.
Cop arrests cook and transports her to police station for booking.
On the ride to the police station, feeling better for having actually performed the authoritative act of arresting the cook, cop regains some perspective on the situation…but not enough to fully recognize his current objective as a foolish over-reaction.
Cop realizes that fellow officers at the police station might view his arresting the cook for salty food as kinda petty and stupid, so he begins to get “really” sick.
Cop arrives at police station and presents cook for processing, then concentrates on delivering a convincing performance as a “poisoned” victim.
Not wanting this thing to get out of hand, bringing media attention and with it the possibility of his course of action being correctly interpreted, cop books cook on lesser charge of misdemeanor reckless conduct, hoping he will achieve both the goal of restoring his self-worth, and making the whole matter go away as quickly as possible.
As a result of the cops performance as a poison victim in view of his peers, burger is deemed poisoned and sent to The Lab (at John Q. Taxpayer’s expense) and cop is instructed by his superiors to go to the hospital, where he is determined to be well (otherwise, news agencies would have played the angle of “Cop Poisoned by Disgruntled Fry Cook” as it is much more frightening to the public than an over-salted burger).
Story breaks locally, is picked up by the AP, then floods the web where millions voice their various opinions. Cop starts losing a little sleep.
My prediction on this…
When The Lab analyzes the burger and determines that it is a burger with excessive quantities of salt and nothing more, coupled with the general public’s majority opinion that the cop is an egomaniacal bastard, superiors will advance the thought to the cop that he possibly over-reacted to his inability to coerce cook with fear tactics.
Cop will go to his grave swearing to any person or investigative body, that he was 100% targeted and poisoned. He’ll do this because, at this stage of the game, that is what he has convinced himself to truly believe.
There will be no follow up story to this…we will never learn the results of the analysis on the burger. The burger will come back from The Lab clean of (intentionally placed, anyway) toxins, and news stories about cops over-compensating for their inadequacies are just so hackneyed these days.
My view of the situation focuses on the cop only. I was going to present both (first cop, then cook), but I got tired. Of course, I am most likely way off-base here…it’s just my sad opinion that this is the way most folks feel about themselves and their fear of being “found out” then “kicked out”.
It is, for these very reasons, why the aliens don’t come.
Ok, I’ll eat that (light on the salt, though, of course).
But, as said upthread, there’s no evidence of any kind of poisoning, let alone intentional poisoning of the guy’s food. And, the officer himself has no evidence of that whatsoever (again, based on the story as reported).
We’ve got a guy who ate food, got sick, then returned to the restaurant and threw the cook in jail, after finding out nothing other than there was potentially an excess of salt on his burger.
Putting this person in jail serves nothing other than the individual officer’s sense of revenge. The cook was not a menace to society, was not going to flee the country, and had in no way done anything illegal or intentionally malicious (as far as we know).
…and we have a worker who’s either targeted the cop and lying about it or she’s too stupid to cook a hamburger.
Who knows maybe one night in jail will teach her -
-not a good idea to purposefully fuck with somebody’s food (especially somebody capable of arresting them)
not a good idea to be so bad at preparing a simple food item that somebody can come to the conclusion that you purposefully fucked with it.
She might just figure out that she’s underqualified to work an entry level position in fast food.
We will probably never know the outcome of this but you can bet big brother corporate Micky D will get to the bottom of it. And I bet the manager and worker will be referred to as former employees afterwords
The problem is that neither of these are reasonable reasons to arrest someone (unless something was done to intentionally cause harm, in which case you’d want some proof first).
If the police go around arresting anyone who is either a jerk or incompetent (or possibly a person who made an honest mistake), then they will be harming themselves by breeding distrust/fear/scorn.
My sister once got sick from a rancid fast-food hamburger. (She threw up, but we did not rush her to the hospital.) Should we have called the police?
I’ve heard of people filing civil suits over this sort of thing and I regard them as petty. There is no way this should be prosecuted as a crime unless the woman intentionally adulterated the burger with something, and so far we have no evidence of that. The “common knowledge” that southern blacks hate the police is not evidence. If the crime lab determines that the burger was poisoned, I’ll change my tune. If they find only excess salt, I hope the charge gets dismissed right quick.
Utter hijack, but…“hi/r”? That doesn’t work out as shorthand for either gender, as for the male you’re missing the final letter and for the female the middle letter is incorrect. Seriously, are people actually using this for “his/her” now? I sincerely hope it doesn’t catch on. Hideous.
That’s like him complaining it was too greasy.