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Just a quick, somewhat off-topic, story. I skipped my senior year in high school because I already had enough credits to graduate since I started taking high school courses in Jr High. So, I enrolled at a local college to start getting some college credits. I only went back to my high school to practice for my sports in the afternoon because the LHSAA thankfully let me stay on all my varsity teams. So, since I only went to classes for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday I got a job at a local restaurant supply warehouse. By the time the summer after graduation came around, they made me a district salesman for the four months until I left for Tulane. It was great, I had a company car and everything. At 18 years old, that was a pretty big deal to me, and I used it to great effect to lure many a young lass into the back seat.....but thats another story. Anyway, so I went around to all of the local restaurants, from McDonalds to local Mom & Pop joints where I sold everything from Dart Styrofoam cups, to cans of nacho cheese sauce, 70 flavors of snow cone syrup, take-out food cartons, any canned or jarred product that fast food or greasy spoons happen to use, and most importantly, we sold the big boxes and metal tanks of soda syrup and the big 150# tanks of CO2. Most of our customers were repeats and had the same orders every week, with minute differences here and there. The only thing that really changed often was the number of syrup boxes or tanks they needed and the number of CO2 tanks. We always had to go in the back doors of food establishments to check on thier boxes or tanks of Coke,Sprite,Dr Pepper syrup and find out how many CO2 tanks they had used in the past week.

So, life was good. I drove a 6-8 hour route every day, heading in a different direction from my home town of Alexandria. I saw some clean places and I saw some dirty places, but one thing that I saw changed my eating habits permanently. In every city and every town that I went to, with no regard for the big "A" rating Health Inspector certificate posted on a wall by the cashier in a cheap plastic frame, each and every chicken joint that I went to made me want regurgitate every piece of crispy, spicy, mild, fried, secret recipe, or rotisserie style chicken that I had ever eaten, but not prepared myself. Every single one of them would have the back door flung open and have big piles of chicken pieces laying on a dismantled cardboard box on the floor. These piles would be covered with hundreds to thousands of flies that would buzz up in a black mass as you tried to walk by. On the sides of the floor, there would be dead flies everywhere, pieces of skin and fat laying on the floor from the pieces of chicken that had been cleaned in the days and weeks before, and the dirty floor would have a veritable lake of blood and protien laden chicken juices that mixed the dirt, dead flies, and rotten parts in and amongst the new batch of soon to be served, chicken pieces. The whole area had the smell of a rotten beast that has been laying in the sun for days on end. I was never really big on fast food chicken anyway, but this pretty much ended any desire I had to eat chicken from a small short order or fast food restaurant again, because every single one of them ( and there were probably 30, or more ) was exactly the same. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Gary's Chicken, Churches Fried Chicken, Popeyes, Chick-Fil-A, Bojangles.

Now, I have eaten chicken from Popeyes, and only Popeyes ( which was the only one I really ate at anyway, maybe Chick-Fil-A occasionally, and was probably the least offensive of the 10 or so chicken producing restaurants ) since then, but the only ones that I will even consider eating from now are the few Popeyes here in Baton Rouge that are attached to gas stations, because they have to do all of the processing and cleaning work in the front of the store, with nothing hidden in the back, so they would never let the food end up in such a sad state for fear that customers might see.

Anyhow, I know its a gross story, but just thought I'd mention it in case there are any big fast food chicken fans out there.

Jester

PS --Not that any self respecting Cajun would eat there anyway, but don't even get me started on Long John Silver's and Captain D's. They were even worse than the chicken joints!

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