The other day my family brought home some Church’s© chicken, and I tore into it before my mother had even put ice into the tea. The batter of the chicken looked very strange at the joints of the leg I was gnawing on. I gave it a glance and a shrug and continued to tear through the deep-fried bird. After the rest of the family had joined the table, my mother stops and says, “There are feathers on this chicken!”
Well, needless to say we decided to take the chicken back to the Den of Ineptitude.
I walked in there with that chicken feeling like some urban myth’s protagonist. I found the manager, the one with sweat dripping from her hands-free drive-thru headset, and told her in my most dramatic voice, “Excuse me, but my chicken is covered in feathers.”
I truly did expect some drama. I thought perhaps the local media would be called. Johnnie Cochran would fly in from the Black Hornet’s Nest and take this case before the proper court. I would get a coupon for free lifetime fried chicken which I’d use to leverage some poor Ugandan girl from her agrarian family and we would live happily ever after. This was my big moment. I had even put on a clean T-shirt.
Here’s the weird part: That manager didn’t skip a beat. She looked up, nodded her head, filled a coke, greeted the pickup window, grabbed my box of feathered chicken, chucked it in the garbage, grabbed a white box from the line, put it in a white bag, asked me what I wanted while she made change for a customer. She caught me off guard by her nonchalance.
“A bunch of chicken nuggets,” I said.
“We don’t have chicken nuggets, sir. We use real chicken strips.”
“I know”, I said. “I saw the feathers.”
She gave me a box large enough to hold one of those fancy Parisian hats they used to make until the Turks started wearing them. A huge box filled with strips.
Then she scurried away back to the mundane business of delivering fried chicken to unsuspecting customers.
How often must this happen? How many times does a dying chicken dance around the automatic feathering machine just before he falls into the limb-severing machine. The manager didn’t even look at the feathers before tossing them. The only explanation is that she has seen so many deep-fried feathers she is no longer ruffled.
